The Greek homeland lay in and around the Aegean Sea. This section of the Mediterranean Sea is dotted with numerous islands both large and small and flanked on the west by the land mass called the Balkan Peninsula, which today forms the territory of the modern nation of Greece, and flanked on the east by the coast of modern Turkey. Greeks also came to live in the western Mediterranean and on the coast of north Africa, and some of the most famous and prosperous of Greek cities were founded in southern Italy and on the island of Sicily (an area commonly referred to by the Latin name “Magna Graecia”).

The landscape of mainland Greece Thuc. 1.2.1 is dominated by mountains, many of which run in ranges along the Balkan Peninsula in a northwest-southeast orientation. A chain of rugged peaks also fences Greece from the northern Balkan peninsula and the region that was Macedonia Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Macedonia in antiquity. Although none of the mountains wrinkling the landscape of the Greek mainland looms higher than 10,000 feet, their steep slopes were difficult to traverse and operated as barriers separating communities. Some regions, such as Thessaly Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Thessaly in eastern central Greece, Messenia Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Messenia, in southwestern Greece, the island of Crete Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Crete southeast of the mainland, and the island of Sicily, had large plains, but much of Greek territory lacked such large-scale open areas. Settlements tended to spring up where there were pockets of arable land nestled among the mountains or along the coast where good harbors could be found. Greece's rivers were practically useless for trade and communication because most of them slowed to a trickle during the many months each year during which little or no rainfall occurred.

The most plentiful natural resource of the mountains of mainland Greece was timber for building houses and ships, but deforestation Plat. Criti. 111c may have already begun to occur in antiquity. In any case, Greeks eventually began to import timber from the regions north of them. Some deposits of metal ore were also scattered throughout Greek territory, as were clays suitable for making pottery and sculpture. Scattered quarries

Only about twenty to thirty percent of the total land area of Greece was arable. The scarcity of level terrain ruled out the raising of cattle and horses on any large scale in most areas; pigs Hom. Od. 14.72, , , , , sheep , Xen. Mem. 2.7.13, , , , , and goats were the common livestock. The domestic chicken

The coastline of mainland Greece Thuc. 1.2.1 was so jagged that almost all its communities were within forty miles of the sea. Most Greeks, regardless of where they lived, never traveled very far from their home; what few long-distance travelers there were customarily went by sea. Overland transport was slow and expensive because rudimentary dirt paths served as the only roads in the predominantly mountainous terrain where most Greeks lived. Their proximity to the Mediterranean Sea allowed Greek entrepreneurs to use it as a highway for contact with one another and for potentially lucrative international trade with, in particular, Egypt and the Near East. But going to sea meant dangers from pirates Thuc. 1.5.1, Thuc. 1.8.1 and storms, and prevailing winds and fierce gales almost ruled out sailing in winter. Even in calm conditions sailors hugged the coast as much as possible and preferred to put in to shore at night for safety. As the eighth-century poet Hesiod commented, merchants needing to make a living took to the sea “because an income means life to poor mortals, but it is a terrible fate to die among the waves.” Hes. WD 686, Hes. WD 646, Hom. Od. 1.182

The climate of Greece is what meteorologists call “Mediterranean,” meaning intermittent heavy rain during a few winter months and hot, dry summers. Snow falls on the upper ranges of the mountains in Greece, but most Greek communities received little snow. Winters could be cold and blustery, however. Since the amount of annual precipitation was highly variable, farming was a precarious business of boom and bust, with drought and flood both to be feared. Like the modern residents of southern California, however, whose climate is also “Mediterranean,” the Greeks thought their climate the world's best Hdt. 1.142.1 despite its hazards. “The Greeks occupy a middle position [between hot and cold climates] and correspondingly enjoy both energy and intelligence,” said the fourth-century philosopher Aristotle, who believed climate controlled a people's political destiny Aristot. Pol. 7.1327b 20 . “For this reason they retain their freedom and have the best of political institutions. In fact, if they could forge political unity among themselves, they could control the rest of the world.”

Speakers of Greek had lived at various locations Thuc. 1.2.1 on the mainland and islands of the Aegean for centuries upon centuries before the period that saw the beginnings of written Greek literature and thus the creation of the texts included in Perseus. The ancient Greeks never in any period of their history constituted a nation in the modern political sense because their independent communities never existed as a unified organization. Greeks identified with each other culturally Hdt. 8.144.2, Isoc. 4.50, Plat. Meno 82b , however, because they spoke the same language and worshipped the same gods, although with local variations in both cases.

Greek civilization of the second millennium B.C., known as Mycenaean after the famous archaeological site of Mycenae , , , in the northeastern Peloponnese (the peninsula that constitutes southern Greece), lies outside the limits of the Overview, but perhaps some background information on it will be helpful. Mycenaean civilization was organized around large architectural complexes today referred to as “palaces.” These structures held many rooms, often elaborately decorated with wall paintings, and were outfitted with luxuries like bath tubs. The elite of Mycenaean society Thuc. 1.9.1 lived very well, in comfort and style.

Political power was held by monarchical rulers Hom. Il. 9.149 apparently controlling separate territories and never achieving unity among themselves. These potent and wealthy rulers controlled redistributive economies, in which agricultural products and other goods were brought into the palaces and then redistributed throughout the society on a predetermined scheme rather than through free markets. Writing, done in a syllabic script known today as Linear B, was used in Mycenaean society primarily to record the transactions of this process, and presumably only the scribes in charge of this record keeping knew how to write. Mycenaean society seems to have been hierarchical, with social differentiation among people marked by wealth, clothing, and titles. No written literature—prose or poetry—is attested for this period.

The power and prosperity of Mycenaean Greece were lost in a period of violent conflict Thuc. 1.12.1 around 1200 B.C. that encompassed not only Greece but also much of the eastern Mediterranean region of the Near East. The causes of this disaster are still obscure, but strife among the principal centers seems to have played a significant role in the undoing of Mycenaean Greece, as perhaps did also incursions by raiders from the sea. The damage done to Greek society by the dissolution of the redistributive economies of Mycenaean Greece after 1200 B.C. took centuries to repair. Only Athens seems to have escaped wholesale disaster. In fact, the later Athenians, of the fifth century B.C., prided themselves on their unique status among the peoples of classical Greece: “sprung from the soil” Eur. Ion 29, Isoc. 4.24, Isoc 12.124 of their homeland (autochthonoi ), as they called themselves, they had not been forced to emigrate in the turmoil that engulfed the rest of Greece in the twelfth and eleventh centuries B.C.

The nature of the Athenians' boast gives some indication of the sorry fate of many other Greeks at the start of the first millennium B.C. Uprooted from their homes, they wandered abroad in search of new territory to settle. The Ionian Greeks , Hdt. 1.146.1, Thuc. 1.12.4, Thuc. 7.57.4, who in later times inhabited the central coast of western Anatolia, dated their emigration from the mainland to this period. Luxuries of Mycenaean civilization like fine jewelry, knives inlaid with gold, and built-in bathtubs disappeared. To an outside observer, Greek society at the end of the Mycenaean Age might have seemed destined for irreversible economic and social decline, even oblivion. This prediction would have been false.

The depressed economic conditions in Greece after the fall of Mycenaean civilization present a dramatic example of the desperately reduced circumstances of life which so many people in the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world had to endure during the worst years of the Dark Age. Mycenaean society collapsed because the complex economic system was destroyed on which its prosperity had depended. The most startling indication of the severe conditions of life in the early Dark Age is that the Greeks apparently lost their knowledge of writing when Mycenaean civilization was destroyed, although it has recently been suggested that the loss was not total. In any case, the loss of the common use of a technology as vital as writing is explicable because the linear B script used by the Mycenaeans was difficult to master and probably known only by a restricted group of specialists, the scribes who worked in the palaces keeping records. They employed writing only for recording the flow of goods into the palaces and then out again for redistribution. When the redistributive economy of Mycenaean Greece was destroyed, there was no longer a place for scribes or a need for writing. The oral transmission of the traditions of the past allowed Greek culture to survive this loss by continuing its stories and legends as valuable possessions passed on from generation to generation.

The Greeks later believed that, following the collapse of the Mycenaeans, a Greek-speaking group from the north, called the Dorians Thuc. 1.12.3, Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Dorians, , began to invade central and southern Greece. Dorians were especially remembered as the ancestors of the Spartans Hdt. 1.56.1, Thuc. 1.18.1, Xen. Const. Lac. 1.1 , the most powerful city-state on the mainland before the spectacular rise to prominence of Athens in the fifth century B.C. Strikingly, however, archaeology has not discovered any distinctive remains attesting a Dorian invasion, and many scholars reject it as a fiction. The lack of written works from the Greek Dark Age Thuc. 1.12.1, means that the mute evidence uncovered by archaeologists must provide the foundation for reconstructing the history of this transitional period.

Archaeological excavation has shown that the Greeks cultivated much less land and had many fewer settlements in the early Dark Age Thuc. 1.12.1, than at the height of Mycenaean prosperity. No longer did powerful rulers ensconced in fortresses of stone preside over several towns and far-flung but tightly organized territories, with their redistributive economies providing a tolerable standard of living for farmers, herders, and a wide array of craft workers. The Greek ships filled with adventurers, raiders, and traders that had plied the Mediterranean during the second millennium now numbered a paltry few. Developed political states no longer existed in Greece in the early Dark Age, and people eked out their existence as herders, shepherds, and subsistence farmers bunched in tiny settlements as small as twenty people in most cases. Prosperous Mycenaean communities had been many times larger. Indeed, the entire Greek population was far smaller in the early Dark Age than it had been previously. As the population shrank, less land was cultivated, leading to a decline in the production of food. The decreased food supply in turn tended to encourage a further decline in the population. By reinforcing one another, these two processes multiplied their effects.

The withering away of agriculture led more Greeks than ever before to herd animals as a larger part of their living in what remained nevertheless a complex agricultural economy. This increasingly pastoral way of life meant that people became more mobile because they had to be prepared to move their herds to new pastures once they had overgrazed their current location. If they were lucky, they might find a new spot that allowed them to grow a crop of grain if they stayed there long enough. As a result of this less-settled lifestyle, people built only simple huts as their houses and got along with few possessions. Unlike their Mycenaean forebears, Greeks in the Dark Age no longer had monumental architecture, and they ceased depicting people and animals in their principal art form, the designs on ceramics .

The general level of poverty perhaps meant that early Dark Age Thuc. 1.12.1, communities were largely egalitarian. Archaeologists have recently analyzed evidence from burials, however, which suggests that Greek society had once again begun to develop a hierarchical system perhaps as early as 1050 B.C. The revival of a social hierarchy in Dark Age Greece clearly shows up in the tenth century B.C. at a site now known as Lefkandi on the island of Euboea, off the eastern coast of the Greek mainland. There archaeologists have discovered the richly furnished burials of a man and woman, who died about 950 B.C. Their riches included goods of Near Eastern manufacture and style, testifying to the ongoing contacts between Greece and the Near East in the Dark Age. These contacts deeply influenced Greek mythology and religion as well as commerce. The dead woman wore elaborate gold ornaments that testify to her exceptional wealth. The couple were buried under a building more than 150 feet long with wooden columns on the exterior. The striking architecture and riches of their graves suggest that they enjoyed high social status during their lives and perhaps received a form of ancestor worship after their death. Such wealthy and powerful people were probably still few in number at this date, but their existence at Lefkandi proves that marked social differentiation had once again emerged in the Greek world. Stresses in this hierarchical organization of Greek society, as we shall see, were to set the stage for the emergence of Greece's influential new political form, the self-governing city-state of free citizens.

The evidence from burials shows that Greeks in more and more locations had become conspicuously wealthy by about 900 B.C. A hierarchical arrangement of society was evidently spreading throughout Greece, and the few men and women at the pinnacle of society had the riches to have expensive material goods placed in their tombs with them. In the earlier part of the Dark Age, the best grave offerings a dead person could expect were a few clay pots. The exceptional contents of rich graves point to significant economic changes already under way by the ninth century B.C.

Metallurgical technology eventually helped bring about the end of the Greek Dark Age. Archaeology allows us to see this trend, as in the evidence from the burial of a male about 900 B.C., which consisted of a pit into which was placed a clay pot to hold the dead man's cremated remains. Surrounding the pot were metal weapons including a long sword, spearheads, and knives. The inclusion of weapons of war in a male grave was a continuation of the burial traditions of the Mycenaean Age, but these arms were forged from iron, not bronze, which had been the primary metal of the earlier period (often referred to therefore as the Bronze Age). This difference reflects a significant shift in metallurgy, which took place throughout the Mediterranean region during the early centuries of the first millennium B.C.: iron displacing bronze as the principal metal used to make tools and weapons. Greeks probably learned to work iron Hes. Th. 862 from voyaging Near Eastern entrepreneurs who brought their skills with them from their homelands. The island of Cyprus seems to have been particularly important as a place where this new technology developed and then was passed on to other places further west. In keeping with the habit of characterizing periods of history from the name of the metal most used at the time, the Dark Age can also be referred to as the Early Iron Age in Greece.

The Greeks, like others in the Near East, turned to iron because they could no longer obtain the tin needed to mix with copper to make bronze. The international trading routes that had once brought tin to Greece and the Near East from distant sources had been disrupted in the upheaval associated with the wide-spread turmoil that affected the eastern Mediterranean region beginning around 1200 B.C. Iron ore, by contrast, was available locally Hom. Od. 1.184 in Greece and in other areas throughout the Near East. Iron eventually replaced bronze in many uses, above all in the production of agricultural tools Hes. WD 387 , swords, and spear points. Bronze remained in use for shields and armor, however. The lower cost of iron tools and weapons meant more people could afford them, and with iron being harder than bronze, implements kept their sharp edges longer.

Better and more plentiful farming implements of iron eventually helped to increase the production of food, a development reflected by the evidence of a burial from Athens. This grave, from about 850 B.C., held the remains of a woman and her treasures, including gold rings and earrings, a necklace of glass beads, and an unusual chest of baked clay. The necklace was an imported item from Egypt or Syria, and the technique of the gold jewelry was also that of the Near East. These objects reflected Greek trade with the more prosperous civilizations of that region Hdt. 1.1.1, , a relationship whose influence on Greece increased as the Dark Age came to an end in the next century. The most intriguing object from the burial is the woman's terracotta storage chest. It was painted with characteristically intricate and regular designs, whose precision has led modern art historians to give the name Geometric to this style of the late Dark Age. On its top were sculpted five beehive-like urns that are miniature models of granaries (structures for storing grain , Hes. WD 465, , , , ). If these models were important enough to be buried as objects of special value, we can deduce that actual granaries and the grain they held were valuable commodities in real life. This deduction in turn means that already by 850 B.C. agriculture had begun to recover from its devastation in the early Dark Age, when herding animals had become more prevalent and cultivation had decreased. Whether the woman was the owner of grain fields we cannot know, but from her sculpted chest we can glimpse the significance of farming for her and her contemporaries.

Increased agricultural production in this period accompanied a growth in population. It is impossible to determine whether a rise in population preceded and led to the raising of more grain or, conversely, whether improvements in agricultural technology and the placing of more fields under cultivation spurred a consequent growth in the population by increasing the number of people the land could support. These two developments reinforced one another: as the Greeks produced more food, the better-fed population reproduced faster, and as the population grew, more people could produce more food. The repopulation of Greece in the late Dark Age established the demographic conditions under which the new political forms of Greece were to emerge.

People like the wealthy woman buried with the granary model at Athens and the earlier couple from Lefkandi constituted the aristocracy that emerged during the later part of the Greek Dark Age. The term aristocracy Aristot. Pol. 4.1293b, Aristot. Nic. Eth. 1160a 33, comes from Greek and means “rule of the best.” Although the use of this term is traditional in accounts of ancient Greek history, it is important to remember that “aristocracy” in this context does not mean what it often means in,for example, French or English history. That is, ancient Greece never had an aristocracy that was an officially recognized nobility, whose members inherited their status regardless of their wealth or other socio-economic characteristics. Rather, the term as used in ancient Greek history refers to the social elite, whose status depended on a combination of factors, of which wealth and public conduct were very important. When one speaks of a Greek aristocrat, then, it is crucial to understand this designation as meaning “a member of the social elite.” Aristocrats in ancient Greece seem to have possessed more wealth than others in their communities, but birth was also a criterion in their enjoying general acknowledgment as the “best” in their society — that is, the people with the greatest social status and political influence. We can only speculate about the various ways in which families might have originally gained their designation as aristocratic and thus became entitled to pass on this status to those born into them. Some aristocratic families in the Dark Age might have inherited their status as descendants of the most prominent and wealthy families of the Mycenean Age; some might have made themselves aristocrats during the Dark Age by amassing wealth and befriending less fortunate people who were willing to acknowledge their benefactors' superior status in return for material help; and some might have acquired aristocratic status by monopolizing control of essential religious rituals.

The aristocrats' ideas and traditions on organizing their communities and about proper behavior for everyone in them—that is, their code of social values—represented, like the reappearance of agriculture, fundamental components of Greece's emerging new political forms. The aristocratic social values of the Dark Age underlie the stories told in the and Hom. Il. 1 ff, Hom. Od. 1 ff., Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Homer , two book-length poems that first began to be written down about the middle of the eighth century B.C., at the very end of the Dark Age. Despite the ancient origins of Homeric poetry, the behavioral code that it portrayed Hom. Il. 6.440, Hom. Od. 4.266 primarily reflected values established in the aristocratic society of Greece of the Dark Age before the rise of political systems based on citizenship.

The primary characters in the Homeric poems are aristocrats, who are expected to live up to a demanding code of values. The men are mainly warriors, like the incomparable Achilles Hom. Il. 9.325, , of the . This poem tells part of the famous story of the attack by a Greek army on the city of Troy ,Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Troy , a stronghold located in northwestern Anatolia. Although it is commonly assumed that the Trojans were a different people from the Greeks, the poems themselves provide no definitive answer to the question of their ethnic identity. In the 's representation of the Trojan War, which the Greeks believed occurred about four hundred years before Homer's time, Achilles is, in the language of the poem, “the best of the Greeks Hom. Il. 1.244, Hom. Il. 1.412, Hom. Il. 16.271 ” because he is a “doer of deeds and speaker of words Hom. Il. 9.443 ” without equal. Achilles' overriding concern in word and action is with the glory and recognition for all time that he can win with his “excellence” (the best available translation for Greek arete Hom. Od. 24.197, Greek dictionary entry for arete, , a word with a range of meanings). Like all aristocrats, Achilles feared the disgrace that he would feel before others if he were seen to fail to live up to the code of excellence. Under the aristocratic code, failure and wrongdoing produced public shame.

A concentration on excellence (arete ) distinguishes the code of values of the aristocrats of the Homeric poems. For an aristocratic woman like Penelope

The Greeks had relearned the technology of writing as a result of contact with the literate civilizations of the Near East and the alphabet developed there long before. Sometime between about 950 and 750 the Greeks modified a Phoenician alphabet Hdt. 5.58.1 to represent the sounds of their own language, and the Greek version of the alphabet eventually formed the base of the alphabet used for English today. Greeks of the Archaic Age , , , (roughly, the period from 750 to 500 B.C.) swiftly applied their newly acquired skill to write down oral literature, such as the and the . The Greeks believed that Homer Hdt. 2.53.2, Thuc. 1.3.3, Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Homer , a blind poet from the Greek region called Ionia Hdt. 1.142.1, Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Ionia, (today the western coast of Turkey), had composed the and . Modern scholarship has often disputed this attribution on the grounds that no single author could have been responsible for these lengthy and complex poems if, as is commonly assumed, they were originally composed and transmitted orally, without the aid of writing. If, on the other hand, Homeric poetry as we have it was composed by writing, the authorship question is on a different footing. Whatever the truth of this much disputed question, Homeric poetry, even if it was put into final form by a single author, grew out of centuries of oral performance by countless Greek poets singing of the deeds and values of legendary aristocrats. Stories from Near Eastern poetic tales influenced this oral poetry, which for centuries helped to transmit cultural values from one generations of Greeks to the next.

Excellence (arete ) as a competitive value for male Greek aristocrats showed up clearly in the Olympic Games, a religious festival associated with a large sanctuary of Zeus, king of the gods of the Greeks. The sanctuary was located at Olympia , , Paus. 5.10.2 , in the northwestern Peloponnese (the large peninsula that forms southern Greece), where the games were held every four years beginning in 776 B.C. During these great celebrations the aristocratic men of the age competed in running events and wrestling Pind. O. 9.13

The competition of the Olympic Games originally centered on contests among aristocrats, who prided themselves on their innate distinctiveness from ordinary people, as the fifth-century B.C. poet Pindar made clear in praising a family of victors: “Hiding the nature you are born with is impossible. The seasons rich in their flowers have many times bestowed on you, sons of Aletes [of Corinth], the brightness that victory brings, when you achieved the heights of excellence in the sacred games.” Pind. O. 13.16 The organization of the festival as an event for all of Greece nevertheless indicates a trend toward communal activity that was under way in Greek society and politics by the mid-eighth century B.C. First of all, the building of a special sanctuary , Paus. 5.10.2, for the worship of Zeus at Olympia provided an architectural center as a focus for public gatherings with a surrounding space for crowds to assemble. The social complement to the creation of this physical environment was the tradition that the Games of Zeus and Hera were panhellenic, that is, open to all Greeks. Moreover, an international truce Thuc. 5.49.1, Aeschin. 2.12 of several weeks was declared so that competitors and spectators from all Greek communities could travel to and from Olympia in security even if wars were otherwise in progress along their way. In short, the arrangements for the Olympic Games demonstrate that in eighth century B.C. Greece the aristocratic values of individual activity and pursuit of excellence by one's self were beginning to be channeled into a new context appropriate for a changing society. This sort of assertion of the importance of communal interests was another important precondition for the creation of Greece's new political forms.

Religion provided the context for almost all communal activity throughout the history of ancient Greece. Sports, as in the Olympic Games held to honor Zeus, took place in the religious context of festivals honoring specific gods. War was conducted according to the signs of divine will that civil and military leaders identified in the sacrifice Hom. Il. 1.447, Perseus Encyclopedia entry for sacrifice, , TRM OV 10.1.3 of animals and in omens derived from occurrences in nature such as unusual weather. Sacrifices themselves, the central event of Greek religious rituals, were performed before crowds in the open air on public occasions that involved communal feasting afterward on the sacrificed meat. The conceptual basis of Greek religion was found in myth ( mythos Hdt. 2.45.1, Plat. Rep. 330d, Plat. Laws 636c, Greek dictionary entry for mythos , a Greek word meaning “story” or “tale”) about the gods and their relationship to humans. In the eighth century B.C., the Greeks began to record their myths in writing, and the poetry of Hesiod Hes. Th. 1 ff., Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Hesiod preserved from this period (there was at this date not yet any Greek literature in prose) reveals how religious myth, as well as the economic changes and social values of the time, contributed to the feeling of community that underlay the creation of new political structures in Greece.

Hesiod Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Hesiod, Hes. Th. 1 , an eighth-century B.C. poet from the region of Boeotia in central Greece, employed myth to reveal the divine origin of justice. His long poem (“The Genealogy of the Gods”) details the birth of the race of gods from primordial Chaos (“void” or “vacuum”) and Earth, the mother of Sky and numerous other children. This myth about the succession of the gods owed its inspiration to Near Eastern myths, another example of the importance of contact with that region for the cultural as well as economic development of Greece as it emerged from its Dark Age. Hesiod explained that, when Sky began to imprison his siblings, Earth persuaded her fiercest male offspring, Kronos, to overthrow him by violence because “Sky first contrived to do shameful things.” Hes. Th. 166 When Kronos later began to swallow up all his own children, Kronos's wife had their son Zeus overthrow his father Hes. Th. 490 by force in retribution for his evil deeds. These vivid stories, which had their origins in Near Eastern myths like those of the Mesopotamian , carried the message that existence, even for gods, entailed struggle, sorrow, and violence. Even more significantly, however, they showed that a concern for justice had also been a component of the divine order of the universe from the beginning. In his poem , Hesiod identified Zeus as the fount of justice in human affairs, a marked contrast to the portrayal of Zeus

Aristocratic men dominated the distribution of justice in Dark Age society. They exercised direct control over their family members and household servants. Others outside their immediate households would become their followers by acknowledging the aristocrats' status as leaders. An aristocrat's followers would grant him a certain amount of authority because, as the followers were roughly equal in wealth and status among themselves, they needed a figure invested with authority to settle disputes and organize defense against raids or other military threats. In anthropological terms, aristocrats operated as chiefs of bands Hom. Il. 18.503 . An aristocratic chief had authority to settle arguments over property and duties, oversaw the distribution of rewards and punishments, and usually headed the religious rituals deemed essential to the security of the group. At the same time, a chief's actual power to coerce unwilling members of his band was limited. When decisions affecting the entire group had to be made, his leadership depended on being capable of forging a consensus by persuading members of the band about what to do. The poet Hesiod describes how an effective chief exercised leadership: “When his people in their assembly get on the wrong track, he gently sets matters right, persuading them with soft words.” Hes. Th. 85 In short, a chief could only lead his followers where they were willing to go.

Aristocratic chiefs sometimes abused their status and created tensions between leaders and followers. Eventually this tension contributed to the political reorganization of the Greek world in the creation of the city-state. A story from the Hom. Il. 2.211 provides a fictional illustration of the kind of abusive aristocratic behavior that chiefs could exhibit in the period before the city-state emerged. According to the , when Agamemnon, the aristocratic leader of the Greek army besieging Troy, summoned the troops to announce a decision to prolong the war, now in its tenth year, an ordinary soldier named Thersites spoke up in opposition. Thersites could express his opinion because Agamemnon led the Greeks as a Dark Age chief led a band, which required that all men's opinions be heard with respect. Thersites criticized Agamemnon as unjustly greedy. “Let's leave him here to digest his booty,” Thersites shouted to his fellow soldiers in the ranks. Odysseus, another chief, immediately rose up to support Agamemnon, saying to Thersites, “If I ever find you being so foolish again, may my head not remain on my body if I don't strip you naked and send you back to your ship crying from the blows I give you.” Odysseus thereupon cowed Thersites with a blow to his back, which drew blood.

In this fictional episode, the assembled soldiers approve of Odysseus' inequitable treatment of Thersites, who admittedly speaks without moderation or tact. For the city-state to be created as a political institution in which all free men had a stake, the idea that all men had the right to speak their minds, even rudely, had to emerge in the real world. Non-aristocratic men had to insist that they deserved equitable treatment, even if aristocrats were to remain in leadership positions and carry out the policies agreed on by the group.

The poet Hesiod Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Hesiod, reveals that a state of heightened tension had developed between aristocratic chiefs and the peasants (the free proprietors of small farms, who might own a slave or two, oxen to work their fields, and other movable property of value) in the eighth century. Their property made peasants the most influential group among the men ranging from poor to moderately well-off who made up the bands of followers of aristocratic chiefs in late Dark Age Greece. Assuming the perspective of a peasant farming a small holding, the poet insisted that the divine origin of justice should be a warning to “bribe-devouring chiefs,” Hes. WD 264 who settled disputes among their followers and neighbors “with crooked judgments.” This feeling of outrage evidently felt by non-aristocrats at not receiving equal treatment in the settlement of disputes served as a stimulus for the gradual movement toward new forms of political organization in Greece.

Polis, from which we derive our term “politics,” is usually translated as “city-state” to emphasize its difference from what we today normally think of as a city. As in many earlier states in the ancient Near East, the polis included not just an urban center, often protected by stout walls in later centuries, but also countryside for some miles around with its various small settlements. Members of the polis, then, lived both in the town at its center and also in the villages scattered around its territory. Thuc. 1.16.1 Presiding over the polis as protector and patron was a particular god, as, for example, Athena at Athens Aesch. Eum. 288,

A polis was independent of its neighbors and had political unity among its settlements. Together the members of these settlements made up a community of citizens comprising a political state, and it was this partnership among citizens Aristot. Pol. 1.1252b 28 that represented the distinctive political characteristic of the polis. Only men had the rights of political participation, but women still counted as citizens of the community legally, socially, and religiously. The Greeks may have been influenced in the organization of the polis by their contacts with the Near East, where the city-monarchies of Cyprus and the states of Phoenicia, situated on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, provided possible precedents. The distinctiveness of citizenship as an organizing concept was that it assumed in theory certain basic levels of legal equality Hdt. 3.80.6, Hdt. 3.142.3, Hdt. 5.37.2, Thuc. 4.78.3 , essentially the expectation of equal treatment under the law, with the exception that different regulations could apply to women in certain areas of life such as acceptable sexual behavior and the control of property. But the general legal equality that the polis provided was not dependent on a citizen's wealth. Since pronounced social differentiation between rich and poor had characterized the history of the ancient Near East and Greece of the Mycenaean Age and had once again become common in Greece by the late Dark Age, it is remarkable that a notion of some sort of legal equality, no matter how incomplete it may have been in practice, came to serve as the basis for the reorganization of Greek society in the Archaic Age. The polis based on citizenship remained the preeminent form of political and social organization in Greece from the time of its earliest appearance about 750 B.C. until the beginning of the Roman Empire eight centuries later. The other most common new form of political organization in Greece was the ethnos Thuc. 3.94.4, Greek dictionary entry for ethnos, , Perseus Encyclopedia entry for confederacies, (“league” or “federation”), a flexible form of association over a broad territory which was itself sometimes composed of city-states.

The geography of Greece greatly influenced the process by which this radically new way of organizing human communities came about. The severely mountainous terrain of the mainland meant that city-states were often physically separated by significant barriers to easy communication, thus reinforcing the tendency of city-states to develop separately and not to cooperate with one another. A single Greek island could be home to multiple city-states maintaining their independence from one another; the large island of Lesbos , Thuc. 8.23.2, Strab. 13.2.1, Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Lesbos , for example, was the home for five different city-states. Since few city-states controlled enough arable land to grow food sufficient to feed a large body of citizens, polis communities no larger than several hundred to a couple of thousand people were normal even after the population of Greece rose dramatically at the end of the Dark Age. By the fifth century Athens had grown to a size of perhaps forty thousand adult male citizens and a total population, including slaves and other non-citizens, of several hundred thousand people, but this was a rare exception to the generally small size of Greek city-states. A population as large as that of classical Athens could be supported only by the regular importation of food Lysias 22.1 from abroad, which had to be financed by trade and other revenues.

The most famous ancient analyst of Greek politics and society, the philosopher Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), later insisted the emergence of the polis had been the inevitable result of the forces of nature at work. “Humans,” he said, “are beings who by nature live in a polis.” Aristot. Pol. 1.1253a 29 Anyone who existed outside the community of a polis, Aristotle only half-jokingly maintained, must be either a beast or a deity. In referring to nature, Aristotle meant the combined effect of social and economic forces.

Some Greeks had emigrated from the mainland eastward across the Aegean Sea to settle in Ionia Hdt. 1.146.1, Thuc. 1.12.4, Thuc. 7.57.4, Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Ionia, as early as the ninth century B.C. Starting around 750 B.C., however, Greeks began to settle even farther outside the Greek homeland. Within two hundred years, Greek colonies were established in areas that are today southern France, Spain, Sicily and southern Italy, and along North Africa and the coast of the Black Sea. Eventually the Greek world had perhaps as many as 1,500 different city-states. A scarcity of arable land certainly gave momentum to emigration from Greece, but the revival of international trade Thuc. 1.12.4 in the Mediterranean in this era perhaps provided the original stimulus for Greeks to leave their homeland, whose economy was still struggling. Some Greeks with commercial interests took up residence in foreign settlements, such as those founded in Spain in this period by the Phoenicians from Palestine. The Phoenicians were active in building commercially-motivated settlements throughout the western Mediterranean. Within a century of its foundation sometime before 750 B.C., for example, the Phoenician settlement on the site of modern Cadiz in Spain had become a city thriving on economic and cultural interaction with the indigenous Iberian population.

Like other peoples of the eastern Mediterranean, Greeks also established their own trading posts abroad. Traders from Euboea, for instance, had already established commercial contacts by 800 B.C. with a community located on the Syrian coast at a site now called Al Mina. Men wealthy enough to finance risky expeditions by sea ranged far from home in search of metals. Homeric poetry testifies to the basic strategy of this entrepreneurial commodity trading. In the , the goddess Athena once appears disguised as a metal trader to hide her identity from the son of the poem's hero: “I am here at present,” she says to him, “with my ship and crew on our way across the wine-dark sea to foreign lands in search of copper; I am carrying iron now.” Hom. Od. 1.182 By about 775 B.C., Euboeans, who seem to have been particularly active explorers, had also established a settlement for purposes of trade on the island of Ischia, in the bay of Naples off southern Italy. There they processed iron ore imported from the Etruscans, who lived in central Italy. Archaeologists have documented the expanding overseas communication of the eighth century by finding Greek pottery at more than eighty sites outside the Greek homeland; for the tenth century, by contrast, only two pots have been found that were carried abroad.

Learning from overseas traders of likely places to relocate, Greek colonists set out from their “mother city” ( metropolis Hdt. 7.51.2, Thuc. 6.82.4 in Greek), which selected a leader called the “founder” (ktistes ). Even though they were going to establish an independent city-state at their new location, colonists were expected to retain ties with their metropolis. A colony that sided with its metropolis' enemy in a war, for example, was regarded as disloyal. Sometimes the colonists enjoyed a friendly welcome from the local inhabitants where they settled; sometimes they had to fight to win the land for their new community. The colony's founder was in charge of laying out the settlement properly and parceling out the land, as Homer describes in speaking of the foundation of a fictional colony: “So [the founder] led them away, settling them in [a place called] Scheria, far from the bustle of men. He had a wall constructed around the town center, built houses, erected temples for the gods, and divided the land.” Hom. Od. 6.7

Commercial interests perhaps first induced Greeks to emigrate, but greater numbers of them began to move abroad permanently in the mid-eighth century B.C., probably because the population explosion in the late Dark Age had caused a scarcity of land available for farming. Because arable land represented the most desirable form of wealth for Greek men, tensions caused by competition for good land arose in some city-states. Emigration helped solve this problem by sending men without land to foreign regions, where they could acquire their own fields in the territory of colonies founded as new city-states. Since colonizing expeditions were apparently usually all male, wives Hdt. 1.146.2 for the colonists had to be found among the locals, either through peaceful negotiation or by violent kidnappings.

The case of the foundation of a Greek colony in Cyrene Hdt. 4.150.2, Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Cyrene, (in what is now Libya in North Africa) in about 630 B.C. reveals how full of tensions the process of colonization could be. The people of the polis of Thera, on an island north of Crete, apparently were unable to support their population. Sending some people out as colonists to Cyrene therefore made sense as a solution to population pressures. A later inscription purports to tells us what happened at the time of colonization and reveals the urgency of the situation at the time: “One adult son [from each family] is to be conscripted....If any man is unwilling to leave when the polis sends him, he shall be subject to the death penalty and his property shall be confiscated.” (M. Crawford and D. Whitehead, , Cambridge, 1983, no. 16B) Evidently the young men of Thera were reluctant to leave their home for the new colony. This evidence shows, then, that colonization in response to population growth was not always a matter of individual choice of the people feeling the pressure. The possibility of acquiring land in a colony on which a man could perhaps grow wealthy obviously had to be weighed against the terrors of being torn from family and friends to voyage over treacherous seas to regions filled with unknown dangers. Greek colonists had reason to be scared about their future. Moreover, in some cases, colonies were founded to rid the metropolis of undesirables whose presence was causing social unrest. The Spartans, for example, colonized Taras Aristot. Pol. 5.1306b 22-31, Strab. 6.3.2 (modern Taranto) in southern Italy in 706 B.C. with a group of illegitimate sons whom they could not successfully integrate into their citizen body. These unfortunate outcasts certainly did not go as colonists by their own choice.

The participation of Greeks in international trade and in colonization increased their contact with the peoples of Anatolia, Egypt, and the Near East. They admired and envied these older civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean for their wealth, such as the gold of the Phrygian kingdom of Midas Hdt.1.14.2-3 , and their cultural accomplishments, such as the lively pictures of animals on Near Eastern ceramics, the magnificent temples of Egypt, and the alphabets of the Phoenician cities. During the early Dark Age, Greek artists had stopped portraying people or other living creatures in their designs. The pictures they saw on pottery imported from the Near East in the late Dark Age and early Archaic Age influenced them to begin once again to depict figures in their paintings on pots. The style of Near Eastern reliefs and free-standing sculptures also inspired creative imitation in Greek art of the period. When the improving economy of the later Archaic Age allowed Greeks to revive monumental architecture in stone, temples for the worship of the gods emulating Egyptian architectural designs represented the most prominent examples of this new trend in erecting large, expensive buildings. The Greeks began to mint coins in the sixth century B.C., a technology they learned from the Lydians, who invented coinage in the seventh century Hdt. 1.94.1 . Long after this innovation, however, much economic exchange continued to be made through barter, especially in the Near East. Highly monetized economies took centuries to develop.

Knowledge of writing was the most dramatic contribution of the ancient Near East to Greece as it emerged from its Dark Age. The Greeks probably originally learned the alphabet from the Phoenicians Hdt. 5.58.1 to use it for record keeping in business and trade, as the Phoenicians did so well, but they soon started to employ it to record literature such as Homeric poetry. Since the ability to read and write remained unnecessary for most purposes in the predominately agricultural economy of archaic Greece and there were no schools, few people at first learned the new technology of letters.

Success in competing for international markets affected the fortunes of Greek city-states during this period. The city-state of Corinth Thuc. 1.13.5, , , for example, grew prosperous from ship building and its geographical location controlling the narrow isthmus of land connecting northern and southern Greece. Since ships plying the east-west sea lanes of the Mediterranean preferred to avoid the stormy passage around the tip of southern Greece, they commonly off-loaded their cargoes for transshipment on a special roadbed built across the isthmus and subsequent reloading on different ships on the other side. Small ships may even have been dragged over the roadbed from one side of the isthmus to the other. Corinth became a bustling center for shipping and earned a large income from sales and harbor taxes. Taking advantage of its deposits of fine clay and the expertise of a growing number of potters Hdt. 2.176.2, , Corinth also developed a thriving export trade in fine decorated pottery, which non-Greek peoples such as Etruscans in central Italy seem to have prized as luxury goods . By the late sixth century B.C., however, Athens began to displace Corinth as the leading Greek exporter of fancy painted pottery, especially after consumers came to prefer designs featuring the red color for which its clay was better suited than Corinth's.

The Greeks were always careful to solicit approval from their gods before setting out from home, whether for commercial voyages or colonization. The god most frequently consulted about sending out a colony was Apollo in his sanctuary at Delphi

The reasons for the change in Greek politics represented by the gradual emergence of the city-state Aristot. Pol. 1.1252b 28 in the Archaic Age remain controversial. An insurmountable difficulty to forming a clear interpretation of this complex process is that the surviving evidence for the change mainly concerns Athens, which was not a typical city-state in significant aspects, as in the large size of its population. Much of what we can say about the reasons for the emergence of the city-state therefore applies solely to Athens. Other city-states certainly emerged under varying conditions and with different results. Nevertheless, it seems possible to draw some general conclusions about the slow process through which city-states began to emerge starting around 750 B.C.

The economic revival of the Archaic Age and the growth in the population of Greece evident by the eighth century B.C. certainly gave momentum to the process. Men who managed to acquire substantial property from success in agriculture or commerce could now demand a greater say in political affairs from the hereditary aristocrats, who claimed status based on their family lines. Theognis of Megara, a sixth-century poet whose verses also reflect earlier conditions, gave voice to the distress of aristocrats at the emergence of new avenues to social and political influence: “... men today prize possessions, and noble men marry into “bad” [that is, non-aristocratic] families and “bad” men into noble families. Riches have mixed up lines of breeding ... and the good breeding of the citizens is becoming obscured.” The increase in population in this era probably came mostly in the ranks of the non-aristocratic poor. Such families raised more children, who could help to farm more land, which had been empty for the taking after the depopulation of the early Dark Age. Like the Zeus of Hesiod's , who acted in response to the injustice of Kronos Hes. Th. 501 , the growing number of poorer non-aristocrats apparently reacted against what they saw as unacceptable inequity in the leadership of aristocrats, who sometimes acted as if they were petty kings in their local territory and dispensed what seemed “crooked” Hes. WD 264 justice to those with less wealth and power. This concern for equity and fairness gave a direction to the social and political pressures created by the growth of the population.

For the city-state to be created as a political institution in which all free men had a share, non-aristocratic men had to insist that they deserved equitable treatment Hdt. 3.80.6, Hdt. 3.142.3, Hdt. 5.37.2, Thuc. 4.78.3 , even if aristocrats were to remain in leadership positions and carry out the policies agreed on by the group. The invention of the concept of citizenship as the basis for the city-state and the extension of citizen status to non-aristocrats responded to that demand. Citizenship above all carried certain legal rights, such as access to courts to resolve disputes, protection against enslavement by kidnapping, and participation in the religious and cultural life of the city-state. It also implied participation in politics, although the degree of participation open to poor men varied among the different city states. The ability to hold public office, for example, could be limited in some cases to owners of a certain amount of property or wealth. Most prominently, citizen status distinguished free men and women TRM OV 11.1 from slaves

Social and economic inequality among citizens persisted as part of life in the polis despite the legal guarantees of citizenship, The incompleteness of the equality that underlay the political structure of the city-state especially revealed itself in the status of citizen women. Women became citizens of the city-states in the crucial sense that they had an identity, social status, and local rights denied metics and slaves. The important difference between citizen and non-citizen women was made clear in the Greek language, which included terms meaning “female citizen” Politis in Soph. El. 1229, (politis), in certain religious cults reserved for citizen women only, and in legal protection against being kidnapped and sold into slavery. Citizen women also had recourse to the courts in disputes over property and other legal wrangles, but they could not represent themselves and had to have men speak for their interests, a requirement that reveals their inequality under the law. The traditional paternalism of Greek society—men acting as “fathers” to regulate the lives of women and safeguard their interests as defined by men—demanded that every woman have an official male guardian ( kurios Male guardian in Isaeus 6.32 ) to protect them physically and legally. In line with this assumption about the need of women for regulation and protection by men, women were granted no rights to participate in politics. They never attended political assemblies, nor could they vote. They did hold certain civic priesthoods, however, and they had access along with men to the initiation rights Aristoph. Thes. 295, Dem. 59.116 of the popular cult of the goddess HH 2.473 Demeter at Eleusis near Athens. This internationally renowned cult, about which more is said elsewhere in the Overview TRM OV 10.1.7 , served in some sense as a safety valve for the pressures created by the remaining inequalities of life in Greek city-states because it offered to all regardless of class its promised benefits of protection from evil and a better fate in the afterworld.

Despite the only limited equality characteristic of the Greek city-state, the creation of this new form of political organization nevertheless represented a significant break with the past, and the extension of at least some political rights to the poor stands as one of the most striking developments in this process of change. Unfortunately we cannot identify with certainty the forces that led to the emergence of the polis as a political institution in which even poor men had a vote on political matters. The explanation long favored by many makes a so-called hoplite revolution responsible for the general widening of political rights in the city-state, but recent research has undermined the plausibility of this theory as a completely satisfactory explanation. Hoplites

Most men in the new city-states were too poor to qualify as hoplites. It is usually assumed that poor men most likely could contribute little to military defense because they lacked hoplite armor and metal weapons and Greek armies at this date made scant use of light-armed troops Hdt. 7.158.4, Thuc. 2.13.8 like skirmishers, slingers, and archers . Nor had the Greeks developed navies yet, the military service for which poor men would provide the manpower in later times when a fleet was a city-state's most effective weapon. If being able to make a contribution to the city-state's defense as a hoplite TRM OV 5.16 was the only grounds for meriting the political rights of citizenship, the aristocrats along with the old and new hoplites had no obvious reason to grant poor men the right to vote on important matters. Yet poor men did become politically empowered citizens in many city-states, with some variations on whether a man had to own a certain amount of land to have full political rights or whether eligibility for higher public offices required a certain level of income. In general, however, all male citizens, regardless of their level of wealth, eventually were entitled to attend, speak in, and cast a vote in the communal assemblies Aristoph. Ach. 19 in which policy decisions for the city-states were made. That poor men gradually came to participate in the assemblies of the city-states means they were citizens possessing the basic component of political equality Hdt. 3.80.6, Hdt. 3.142.3, Hdt. 5.37.2, Thuc. 4.78.3 . The hoplite revolution fails as a complete explanation of the development of the city-state above all because it cannot account for the extension of this right to the poor. Furthermore, the emergence of large numbers of men wealthy enough to afford hoplite armor seems to belong to the middle of the seventh century B.C., well after the period when the city-state as an innovative form of political organization was first coming into existence.

No thoroughly satisfactory alternative or complement to the theory of hoplite revolution has yet emerged to explain the rise of the polis as a political organization that opened citizenship to poor citizens as well as those better off TRM OV 5.2, Ps. Xen. Const. Ath. 1.2 . The laboring free poor—the workers in agriculture, trade, and crafts—contributed much to the economic strength of the city-state, but it is hard to see how their value as laborers Hdt. 2.167.2 could have been translated into political rights. The better-off elements in society certainly did not extend the rights of citizenship to the poor out of any romanticized vision of poverty as spiritually noble. As one contemporary put it, “Money is the man; no poor man ever counts as good or honorable.” One significant boost to extending political rights to the poor perhaps came from the sole rulers, called tyrants TRM OV 6.16 , who seized power for a time in some city-states and whose history will be discussed subsequently. Tyrants could have used grants of citizenship to poor or disenfranchised men as a means of marshaling popular support for their regimes. Another, more speculative possibility is that the aristocrats and hoplites TRM OV 5.16 had simply become less cohesive as a political group in this period of dramatic change, thereby weakening opposition to the growing idea that it was unjust to exclude the poor from political participation. When the poor agitated for power in the citizen community, on this view, there would have been no united front of aristocrats and hoplites to oppose them, making compromise necessary to prevent destructive civil unrest. Or it may be that we underestimate the significance of lightly-armed combatants in the eighth century, when hoplites were presumably not as numerous as in later times and perhaps the sheer force of the numbers of poor men—wielding staves, throwing rocks, employing farming implements as weapons—could have helped their city-state's contingent of hoplites to sway the tide of battle against an opposing force.

The hallmark of the politics of the developed Greek city-states TRM OV 5.2 was certainly the practice of the citizen men making decisions communally. Aristocrats continued to be powerfully influential in Greek politics even after city-states had come into existence, but the unprecedented political influence non-aristocratic men came to enjoy in city-states constituted the most remarkable feature of the change in the political organization of Greek society in the Archaic Age. This process was gradual, as city-states certainly did not suddenly emerge fully formed around 750 B.C. Three hundred years after that date, for example, the male citizens of Athens were still making major changes in their political institutions to disperse political power more widely among the male citizen body.

The only evidence for slavery in the Dark Age—the language of the poetry of Homer and Hesiod—reveals complex relationships of dependency among free and unfree people. Some people taken prisoner in war seem to be chattel slaves (slaves

The creation of citizenship as a category to define membership in the exclusive group of people constituting a polis inevitably highlighted the contrast between those included in the category of citizens and those outside it. Freedom from control by others was a necessary precondition to become a citizen with full political rights, which in the city-states meant being a free-born adult male. The strongest contrast citizenship produced, therefore, was that between free and unfree. In this way, the development of a clear idea of personal freedom in the formation of the city-state as a new political form may ironically have encouraged the complementary development of chattel slavery in the Archaic Age. The rise in economic activity in this period probably also encouraged the importation of slaves by increasing the demand for labor. In any case, slavery as it developed in the Archaic Age reduced unfree persons to a state of absolute dependence; they were the property of their owners. As Aristotle later categorized them, slaves TRM OV 5.20 were “living tools.” Aristot. Pol. 1.1253b 32

Captives taken in war provided an important source of slaves TRM OV 5.20 , and relatively few slaves seem to have been born and raised in the households of those for whom they worked. Slaves were also imported from the regions to the north and east of Greek territory, where non-Greek people would be seized by pirates or foreign raiders. The fierce bands in these areas would also capture each other and sell the captives to slave dealers. The dealers would then sell their purchases in Greece at a profit. Herodotus, a Greek historian of the fifth century B. C., reported that some of the Thracians Hdt. 5.6.1 , a group of peoples living to the north of mainland Greece, “sold their children for export.” But this report probably meant only that one band of Thracians sold children captured from other bands of Thracians, whom the first group considered different from themselves. The Greeks lumped together all foreigners who did not speak Greek as “barbarians” Hom. Il. 2.867, Aesch. Ag. 1051, , —people whose speech sounded to Greeks like the repetition of the meaningless sounds “bar, bar.” Greeks, like Thracians and other slave-holding peoples, found it easier to enslave people whom they considered different from themselves and whose ethnic and cultural otherness made it easier to disregard their shared humanity. Greeks also enslaved fellow Greeks, however, especially those defeated in war, but these Greek slaves were not members of the same polis as their masters. Rich families prized Greek slaves with some education because they could be made to serve as tutors for children, for whom there were no publicly-financed schools in this period.

Chattel slavery became widespread in Greece only after about 600 B.C. Eventually, slaves became cheap enough that people of moderate means could afford one or two Hes. WD 406 . Nevertheless, even wealthy Greek landowners never acquired gangs of hundreds of slaves like those who maintained Rome's water system under the Roman Empire or worked large plantations in the southern United States before the American Civil War. Maintaining a large number of slaves year around in ancient Greece would have been uneconomical because the cultivation of the crops grown there called for short periods of intense labor punctuated by long stretches of inactivity, during which slaves would have to be fed even while they had no work to do.

By the fifth century B.C., however, the number of slaves in some city-states had grown to as much as one-third of the total population. This percentage still means that most labor was performed by small land-owners and their families themselves, sometimes hiring free workers. The special system of slavery in Sparta TRM OV 6.6 provides a rare exception to this situation.

Rich Greeks everywhere regarded working for someone else for wages as disgraceful, but their attitude did not correspond to the realities of life for many poor people, who had to earn a living at any work they could find. Like free workers, chattel slaves TRM OV 5.20 did all kinds of labor. Household slaves Xen. Ec. 10.10 , often women, had the physically least dangerous existence. They cleaned, cooked, fetched water from public fountains

Some slaves enjoyed a measure of independence by working as public slaves Aristoph. Lys. 436, Aeschines 1.54, Diod. 13.102.1, TRM OV 5.20 owned by the city-state instead of an individual. They lived on their own and performed specialized tasks. In Athens, for example, public slaves in the classical period had the responsibility for certifying the genuineness of the city-state's coinage as well as many other administrative jobs in city service. Athenian public slaves also formed a corps of assistants to the citizen magistrates responsible for the punishment of criminals, and the city-state's official executioner was a public slave. In this way, citizens were able to maintain an arm's-length distance between themselves and distasteful jobs like the arrest and execution of fellow citizens.

Slaves attached to temples also lived without individual owners because temple slaves belonged to the god of the sanctuary, for which they worked as servants. Some female temple slaves served as sacred prostitutes Strabo 8.6.20 at the temple of Aphrodite in Corinth, and their earnings helped support the sanctuary.

Under the best conditions, household slaves TRM OV 5.20 with humane masters might live lives free of violent punishment. They might even be allowed to join their owners' families on excursions and attend religious rituals such as sacrifices. Without the right to a family of their own, however, without property, without legal or political rights, they lived an existence alienated from regular society. In the words of an ancient commentator, chattel slaves lived lives of “work, punishment, and food.” Aristot. Econ. 1.1344a 35 Their labor helped maintain the economy of Greek society, but their work rarely benefited themselves. Yet despite the misery of their condition, Greek chattel slaves—outside Sparta Thuc. 1.101.2 —almost never revolted on a large scale, perhaps because they were of too many different origins and nationalities and too scattered to organize themselves for rebellion. Sometimes owners freed their slaves voluntarily Dem. 36.47, Dem. 59.2 , and some promised freedom at a future date to encourage their slaves to work hard in the meantime. Freed slaves did not become citizens in Greek city-states but instead mixed into the population of resident foreigners (the metics). They were expected to continue to help out their former masters when called upon.

The emergence of slavery TRM OV 5.20 in the city-state on a large scale gave women new and bigger responsibilities for the household (oikos, oikia), especially rich women, whose lives were especially circumscribed by the responsibility of managing their large households. As partners in the maintenance of the family with their husbands Xen. Ec. 3.15 , who spent their time outside farming, participating in politics, and meeting their male friends, wives were entrusted with the management of the household ( oikonomia Plat. Laws 694c, Plat. Laws 809c, Hom. Od. 1.356, Eur. Med. 249, , whence our word “economics”). They were expected to raise the children, , supervise the preservation and preparation of food, keep the family's financial accounts, weave cloth to make clothing,

Poor women worked outside the home, often as small-scale merchants Aristoph. Thes. 446, , in the public market that occupied the center of every settlement. Only at Sparta did women have the freedom to participate in athletic training along with men. Xen. Const. Lac. 1.4 Women played their major role in the public life of the city-state by participating in funerals, state festivals, and religious rituals. Certain festivals were reserved for women only, especially in the cult of the goddess Demeter, whom the Greeks credited with teaching them the indispensable technology of agriculture Isoc. 4.28, TRM OV 10.1.7 . As priestesses, women also fulfilled public duties in various official cults; for example, women officiated as priestesses ,

Upon marriage women became the legal wards of their husbands, as they previously had been of their fathers while still unmarried. Marriages were arranged by men. A woman's guardian Isaeus 6.32 —her father, or if he were dead, her uncle or her brother—would commonly betroth her to another man's son while she was still a child, perhaps as young as five. The betrothal was an important public event conducted in the presence of witnesses. The guardian on this occasion repeated the phrase that expressed the primary aim of marriage: “I give you this woman for the plowing [procreation] of legitimate children.” Plat. Crat. 406b, Greek dictionary entry for aroô The marriage itself customarily took place when the girl was in her early teens and the groom ten to fifteen years older. Hesiod advised a man to marry a virgin in the fifth year after her puberty, when he himself was “not much younger than thirty and not much older.” Hes. WD 697 A legal marriage consisted of the bride's going to live in the house of her husband. The procession to his house served as the ceremony. The woman brought with her a dowry Lys. 19.9, Aristot. Pol. 2.1270a 20 of property (perhaps land yielding an income, if she were wealthy) and personal possessions that formed part of the new household's assets and could be inherited by her children. Her husband was legally obliged to preserve the dowry and to return it in case of a divorce Andoc. 4.14, Dem. 30.15 . Procedures for divorce were more concerned with power than law: a husband could expel his wife from his home, while a wife, in theory, could on her own initiative leave her husband to return to the guardianship of her male relatives. Her freedom of action could be constricted, however, if her husband used force to keep her from leaving. Plut. Alc. 8.3-4 Except in certain cases in Sparta Xen. Const. Lac. 1.7 , monogamy was the rule in ancient Greece, and a nuclear family structure (that is, husband, wife, and children living together without other relatives in the same house) was common, although at different stages of life a married couple might have other relatives living with them. Citizen men could have sexual relations without penalty with slaves, foreign concubines, female prostitutes, or willing preadult citizen males. Citizen women had no such sexual freedom, and adultery carried harsh penalties for wives, as well as the male adulterer, except at Sparta when a woman was childless, the aim of the liaison was to produce children, and the husband gave his consent.

More than anything else, a dual concern to regulate marriage and procreation and to maintain family property underlay the placing of the legal rights of Greek women and the conditions of their citizenship under the guardianship of men. The paternalistic attitude of Greek men toward women was rooted in the desire to control human reproduction Aesch. Eum. 658 and, consequently, the distribution of property, a concern that gained special urgency in the reduced economic circumstances of the Dark Age. Hesiod, for instance, makes this point explicitly in relating the myth of the first woman, named Pandora , Hes. WD 82 . According to the legend, Zeus, the king of the gods, created Pandora as a punishment for men when Prometheus, a divine being hostile to Zeus, stole fire from Zeus to give it to Prometheus's human friends, who had hitherto lacked that technology. Pandora subsequently loosed “evils and diseases” into the previously trouble-free world of men by removing the lid from the jar or box the gods had filled for her. Hesiod then refers to Pandora's descendants, the female sex, as a “beautiful evil” for men ever after, comparing them to drones who live off the toil of other bees while devising mischief at home. Hes. Th. 570 But, he goes on to say, any man who refuses to marry to escape the “troublesome deeds of women” will come to “destructive old age” without any children to care for him. After his death, moreover, his relatives will divide his property among themselves. A man must marry, in other words, so that he can sire children to serve as his support system in his waning years and to preserve his holdings after his death by inheriting them. Women, according to Greek mythology, were for men a necessary evil, but the reality of women's lives in the city-state incorporated social and religious roles of enormous importance.

The Spartans made oligarchy the political base for a society devoted to military readiness, and the resulting Spartan way of life Xen. Const. Lac. 1.1 became famous for its discipline, which showed most prominently in the Spartan infantry, the most powerful military force in Greece during the Archaic Age. Sparta's easily defended location , Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Laconia, Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Spartans, —nestled on a narrow north-south plain between rugged mountain ranges in the southeastern Peloponnese, in a region called Laconia (hence the designation of Spartans as Laconians)—gave it a secure base for developing its might. Sparta had access to the sea through a harbor Paus. 3.21.6, situated some twenty-five miles south of its urban center, but this harbor opened onto a dangerous stretch of the Mediterranean whipped by treacherous currents and winds. As a consequence, enemies could not threaten the Spartans by sea, but their relative isolation from the sea also kept the Spartans from becoming adept sailors. Their interests and their strength Thuc. 1.10.2 lay on the land.

The Greeks believed the ancestors of the Spartans were Dorians Paus. 3.2.6, TRM OV 3.2 who had invaded the Peloponnese from central Greece and defeated the original inhabitants of Laconia around 950 B.C., but no archaeological evidence supports the notion that a “Dorian invasion” actually took place. From wherever the original Spartans came, they conquered the inhabitants of Laconia and settled in at least four small villages, two of which apparently dominated the others. These early settlements later cooperated to form the core of what would in the Archaic Age Paus. 3.1.1 ff on Sparta's early history become the polis of the Spartans. The Greeks gave the name “synoecism” Thuc. 2.15.1 (“union of households”) to this process of political unification, in which most people continued to live in their original villages even after one village began to serve as the center of the new city-state. One apparent result of the compromises required to forge Spartan unity was that the Spartans retained not one but two hereditary military leaders of high prestige, whom they called kings. These kings Hdt. 6.52, Xen. Const. Lac. 13.1 , perhaps originally the leaders of the two dominant villages, served as the religious heads of Sparta and commanders of its army. The kings did not enjoy unfettered power to make decisions or set policy, however, because they operated not as pure monarchs but as leaders of the oligarchic institutions that governed the Spartan city-state. Rivalry between the two royal families periodically led to fierce disputes, and the initial custom of having two supreme military commanders also paralyzed the Spartan army when the kings disagreed on strategy in the middle of a military campaign. The Spartans therefore eventually decided that the army on campaign would be commanded by only one king at a time.

The “few” (oligoi ) who made policy in the oligarchy ruling Sparta were a group of twenty-eight men over sixty years old, joined by the two kings. This group of thirty, called the “council of elders” ( gerousia Dem. 20.107, Aristot. Pol. 2.1270b 24 ), formulated proposals that were submitted to an assembly of all free adult males. This assembly had only limited power to amend the proposals put before it; mostly it was expected to approve the council's plans. Rejections were rare because the council retained the right to withdraw a proposal when the reaction to it by the crowd in the assembly presaged a negative vote. “If the people speak crookedly,” according to Spartan tradition, “the elders and the leaders of the people shall be withdrawers [of the proposal].” The council could then bring the proposal back on another occasion after there had been time to marshal support for its passage.

A board of five annually elected “overseers” ( ephors Xen. Const. Lac. 8.3-4 ) counterbalanced the influence of the kings and the gerousia. Chosen from the adult male citizens at large, the ephors convened the gerousia and the assembly, and they exercised considerable judicial powers of judgment and punishment. They could even bring charges against a king and imprison him until his trial. The creation of the board of ephors diluted the political power of the oligarchic gerousia and the kings because the job of the ephors was to ensure the supremacy of law. The Athenian Xenophon later reported Xen. Const. Lac. 15.6-7 : “All men rise from their seats in the presence of the king, except for the ephors. The ephors on behalf of the polis and the king on his own behalf swear an oath to each other every month: the king swears that he will exercise his office according to the established laws of the polis , and the polis swears that it will preserve his kingship undisturbed if he abides by his oath.”

The Spartans were sticklers for obedience to the law (nomos ) as the guide to proper behavior on matters large and small. When the ephors entered office, for example, they issued an official proclamation to the men of Sparta: “Shave your moustache and obey the laws.” The depth of Spartan respect for their system of government under law was symbolized by their tradition that Apollo of Delphi had sanctioned it with an oracle called the Rhetra Hdt. 1.65.2, Xen. Const. Lac. 1.2 . A Spartan leader named Lycurgus, they said, had instituted the reforms that the Rhetra institutionalized. Even in antiquity historians had no firm information about the dates of Lycurgus's leadership or precisely how he changed Spartan laws. All we can say today is that the Spartans evolved their law-based political system during the period from about 800 to 600 B.C. Unlike other Greeks, the Spartans never had their laws written down. Instead, they preserved their system from generation to generation with a distinctive, highly structured way of life based on a special economic foundation.

The distinctiveness of the Spartan way of life Xen. Const. Lac. 1.2 was fundamentally a reaction to their living in the midst of people whom they had conquered in war and enslaved to exploit economically but who outnumbered them greatly. To maintain their position of superiority over their conquered neighbors, from whom they derived their subsistence, Spartan men had to turn themselves into a society of soldiers constantly on guard. They accomplished this transformation by a radical restructuring of traditional family life enforced by strict adherence to the laws and customs governing practically all aspects of behavior. Through constant, daily reinforcement of their strict code of values, the Spartans ensured their survival against the enemies they had created by subjugating their neighbors. The seventh-century poet Tyrtaeus, whose verses exemplify the high quality of the poetry produced in early Sparta before its military culture began to exclude such accomplishments, expressed that code in his ranking of martial courage as the supreme male value: “I would never remember or mention in my work any man for his speed afoot or wrestling skill, not if he was as huge and strong as a Cyclops or could run faster than the North Wind, nor more handsome than Tithonus or richer than Midas or Cinyras, nor more kingly than Pelops, or had speech more honeyed than Adrastus, not even if he possessed every glory—not unless he had the strength of a warrior in full rush.”

Some of the conquered inhabitants of Laconia, the territory of Sparta, continued to live in self-governing communities. Called “those who live round about” (perioikoi ), these neighbors were required to serve in the Spartan army and pay taxes but lacked citizen rights. Perhaps because they retained their personal freedom and property, however, the perioikoi Hdt. 6.58.2, Strab. 8.5.4 never rebelled against Spartan control. Far different was the fate of the conquered people who ended up as helots , a word derived from the Greek term for “capture.” Later ancient commentators described the helots as “between slave and free” because they were not the personal property of individual Spartans but rather slaves belonging to the whole community, which alone could free them. Helots had a semblance of family life because they were expected to produce children to maintain their population, which was compelled to labor as farmers and household slaves as a way of freeing Spartan citizens from any need to do such work. Spartan men in fact wore their hair very long to show they were “gentlemen” rather than laborers, for whom long hair was an inconvenience.

In their private lives, helots could keep some personal possessions and practice their religion, as could slaves generally in Greece. Publicly, however, helots lived under the threat of officially sanctioned violence. Thuc. 4.80.2 lived under the threat of officially sanctioned violence. Every year the ephors formally declared a state of war to exist between Sparta and the helots, thereby allowing any Spartan to kill a helot without any civil penalty or fear of offending the gods by unsanctioned murder. By beating the helots frequently, forcing them to get drunk in public as an object lesson to young Spartans, marking them out by having them wear dogskin caps, and generally treating them with scorn, the Spartans consistently emphasized the otherness of the helots compared to themselves. In this way, the Spartans erected a moral barrier between themselves and the helots to justify their harsh treatment of fellow Greeks.

When the arable land of Laconia, which was predominately held by aristocrats, proved too small to support the full citizen population of Sparta, the Spartans attacked their Greek neighbors to the west in the Peloponnese, the Messenians Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Messenia . In the First Messenian War Paus. 4.4.4, (c. 730-710 B.C.) and then in the Second (c. 640-630 B.C.), the Spartan army captured the territory of Messenia, which amounted to forty percent of the Peloponnese, and reduced the Messenians to the status of helots. With the addition of the tens of thousands of people in Messenia, the total helot population now more than outnumbered that of Sparta, whose male citizens at this time amounted to perhaps between 8,000 and 10,000. The terrible loss felt by the Messenians at their fate is well portrayed by their legend of King Aristodemus Paus. 4.9.6, , whom the Messenians remembered as having sacrificed his beloved daughter to the gods of the underworld in an attempt to enlist their aid against the invading Spartans. When his campaign of guerrilla warfare at last failed, Aristodemus is said to have slain himself in despair on her grave. Deprived of their freedom and their polis , the Messenian helots were ever after on the lookout for a chance to revolt against their Spartan overlords.

Their labor made helots valuable to the Spartans. Laconian and Messenian helots alike primarily farmed plots of land that the state had originally allotted to individual Spartan households for their sustenance. Some helots also worked as household servants. By the fifth century, helots would also accompany Spartan hoplite warriors on the march to carry their heavy gear and armor. In the words of the seventh-century B.C. poet Tyrtaeus, helots worked “like donkeys exhausted under heavy loads; they lived under the painful necessity of having to give their masters half the food their ploughed land bore.” Paus. 4.14.4 This compulsory rent of fifty percent of everything produced by the helots working on each free family's assigned plot was supposed to amount to seventy measures of barley each year to the male master of the household and twelve to his wife, along with an equivalent amount of fruit and other produce. In all, this food was enough to support six or seven people. The labor of the helots allowed Spartan men to devote themselves to full-time training for hoplite warfare in order to protect themselves from external enemies and to suppress helot rebellions, especially in Messenia. Contrasting the freedom of Spartan citizens from ordinary work with the lot of the helots , the later Athenian Critias commented “Laconia is the home of the freest of the Greeks, and of the most enslaved.”

The entire Spartan way of life was directed toward keeping the Spartan army at tip-top strength. Boys lived at home only until their seventh year, when they were taken away to live in communal barracks with other males until they were thirty. They spent most of their time exercising, hunting, training with weapons, and being acculturated to Spartan values by listening to tales of bravery and heroism at the common meals presided over by older men Xen. Const. Lac. 2.1 . The standard of discipline was strict, to prepare young males for the hard life of a soldier on campaign. For example, they were not allowed to speak at will. (Our word “laconic” meaning “of few words” comes from the Greek word “Laconian,” one of the terms for a Spartan; another is Lacedaimonian, from the name Lacedaimon applied to Sparta). Boys were also purposely underfed so that they would have to develop the skills of stealth by stealing food. Yet if they were caught, punishment and disgrace followed immediately. One famous Spartan tale taught how seriously boys were supposed to fear such failure: having successfully stolen a fox, which he was hiding under his clothing, a Spartan youth died because he let the panicked animal rip out his insides rather than be detected in the theft. By the Classical period, older boys would be dispatched to live in the wilds for a period as members of the “secret band” Plat. Laws 633b whose job it was to murder any helots who seemed likely to foment rebellion.

Spartan boys who could not survive the tough conditions of their childhood training fell into social disgrace and were not certified as Equals Xen. Hell. 3.3.5, Xen. Const. Lac. 13.1 (homoioi), the official name for adult males entitled to full citizen rights of participation in politics and the respect of the community. Only the sons of the royal family were exempted from this training, perhaps to avoid a potential social crisis if a king's son failed to stay the course.

Each Spartan Equal had to gain entry to a group that dined together at common meals, in a “common mess” Hdt. 1.65.5, Xen. Const. Lac. 5.2 (sussition), each of which had about fifteen members. If not blackballed when he applied, the new member was admitted on the condition that he contribute a regular amount of barley, cheese, figs, condiments, and wine to the mess from the produce provided by the helots working on his family plot. Some meat was apparently contributed, too, because Spartan cuisine was infamous for a black, bloody broth of pork condemned as practically inedible by other Greeks. Perhaps it was made from the wild boars Spartan men loved to hunt, an activity for which messmates were formally excused from the compulsory communal meals. If any member failed to keep up his contributions, he was expelled from the mess and lost his full citizen rights. The experience of spending so much time in these common messes schooled Sparta's young men in the values of their society. There they learned to call all older men “father” Xen. Const. Lac. 6.1-2 to emphasize that their primary loyalty was to the group and not to their genetic families. There they were chosen to be the special favorites of males older than themselves to build bonds of affection, including physical love, for others at whose side they would have to march into deadly battle. There they learned to take the rough joking of army life for which Sparta was well known. In short, the common mess took the place of a boy's family and school when he was growing up and remained his main social environment once he had reached adulthood. Its function was to mold and maintain his values consistent with the demands of the one honorable occupation for Spartan men: a soldier obedient to orders. Tyrtaeus enshrined the Spartan male ideal in his poetry: “Know that it is good for the polis and the whole people when a man takes his place in the front row of warriors and stands his ground without flinching.”

Spartan women Xen. Const. Lac. 1.4 were renowned throughout the Greek world for their relative freedom. Other Greeks regarded it as scandalous that Spartan girls exercised with boys and did so wearing minimal clothing. Women at Sparta were supposed to use the freedom from labor provided by the helot system to keep themselves physically fit to bear healthy children and raise them to be strict upholders of Spartan values. A metaphorical formulation of the male ideal for Spartan women appears, for example, in the poetry of Alcman in the late seventh century, who wrote songs for the performances of female and male choruses that were common on Spartan civic and religious occasions. The dazzling leader of a women's chorus, he writes, “stands out as if among a herd of cows someone placed a firmly-built horse with ringing hooves, a prize winner from winged dreams.”

Spartan women, like men, could own land Aristot. Pol. 2.1270a privately. Ordinary coined money Xen. Const. Lac. 7.5 was deliberately banned to try to discourage the accumulation of material goods, but the ownership of land remained extremely important in Spartan society. More and more land came into the hands of women in later Spartan history because the male population declined Plat. Laws 780b through losses in war, especially during the Classical Age. Moreover, Spartan women with property enjoyed special status as a result of the Spartan law forbidding the division of the portion of land originally allotted to a family. This law meant that, in a family with more than one son, all the land went to the eldest son. Fathers with multiple sons therefore needed to seek out brides for their younger sons who had inherited land and property from their fathers because they had no brother surviving. Otherwise, younger sons, inheriting no land from their own family, might fall into dire poverty.

The freedom of Spartan women from some of the restrictions imposed on them in other Greek city-states had the same purpose as the men's common messes TRM OV 6.11 : the production of manpower for the Spartan army. By the Classical Age, the ongoing problem of producing enough children to keep the Spartan citizen population from shrinking had grown acute. Plat. Laws 780b, Aristot. Pol. 2.1270a Men were legally required to get married Xen. Const. Lac. 1.5 , with bachelors subjected to fines and public ridicule. Women who died in childbirth were apparently the only Spartans allowed to have their names placed on their tombstones, a mark of honor for their sacrifice to the state.

With their husbands so rarely at home, women directed the households, which included servants, daughters, and sons until they left for their communal training. As a result, Spartan women exercised more power in the household than did women elsewhere in Greece. Until he was thirty, a Spartan husband was not allowed to live with his family, and even newly-wed men were expected to pay only short visits to their brides by sneaking into their own houses at night. This tradition was only one of the Spartan customs of heterosexual behavior that other Greeks found bizarre. If all parties agreed, a woman could have children by a man other than her husband, so pressing was the need to reproduce in this strictly ordered society.

All Spartan citizens were expected to put service to their city-state before personal concerns because Sparta's survival was continually threatened by its own economic foundation, the great mass of helots Aristot. Pol. 2.1269b 7 . Since Sparta's well-being depended on the systematic exploitation of these enslaved Greeks, its entire political and social system by necessity had as its aim a staunch militarism and a conservatism in values. Change meant danger at Sparta. As part of its population policy, however, Spartan conservatism encompassed sexual behavior Xen. Const. Lac. 1.7 seen as overly permissive by other Greeks. The Spartans simultaneously institutionalized a form of equality as the basis for their male social unit, the common mess TRM OV 6.11 , while denying true social and political equality to ordinary male citizens by making their government an oligarchy. Whatever other Greeks may have thought of the particulars of the Spartan system, they admired the Spartans' unswerving respect for their laws Hdt. 7.104.4 as a guide to life in hostile surroundings, albeit of their own making.

Opposition to oligarchic domination brought the first Greek tyrants TRM OV 5.18, Hdt. 3.53.3 on Periander's dynasty, Hdt. 5.92B.1 ff on rise of Cypselus of Corinth, Thuc. 1.13 on rise of tyrannies, Thuc. 1.17 on his view of tyrants to power in numerous city-states, although Sparta never experienced a tyranny. Greek tyranny represented a distinctive type of rule for several reasons. For one, although tyrants were by definition rulers who usurped power by force rather than inheriting it like legitimate kings, they then established family dynasties to maintain their tyranny, with sons inheriting their fathers' position as the head of state. Also, the men who became tyrants were usually aristocrats, or at least near-aristocrats, who nevertheless rallied support from non-aristocrats for their coups. In places where propertyless men may have lacked citizenship or at least felt substantially disenfranchised in the political life of the city-state, tyrants perhaps won adherents by extending citizenship and other privileges to these groups. Tyrants moreover sometimespreserved the existing laws and political institutions Hdt. 1.59.6, Thuc. 6.54.5, Aristot. Ath. Pol. 16.2 of their city-states as part of their rule, thus promoting social stability.

The most famous early tyranny arose at Corinth

As in the case of the Cypselid tyranny at Corinth, most tyrannies needed to cultivate support among the masses of their city-states to remain in power because their armies were composed primarily of non-aristocrats. The dynasty of tyrants Hdt. 3.39.1 on the island of Samos Thuc. 1.115.2, revolt of Samos in Plut. Per. 24.1, in the eastern Aegean Sea, for example, who came to power about 540 B.C., built enormous public works to benefit their city-state and provide employment. They began construction of a temple to Hera , Hdt. 3.60.1 meant to be the largest in the Greek world, and they dramatically improved the water supply of their urban center by excavating a great tunnel connected to a distant spring. This marvel of engineering with a channel eight feet high ran for nearly a mile through a 900-foot high mountain. The later tyrannies that emerged in city-states on Sicily Hdt. 7.153.1 similarly graced their cities with beautiful temples and public buildings.

By working in the interests of their peoples, some tyrannies, like that founded by Cypselus at Corinth, maintained their popularity for decades. Other tyrants experienced bitter opposition from aristocrats jealous of the tyrant's power or provoked civil war by ruling brutally and inequitably. The poet Alcaeus of the city-state of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos in the northeastern Aegean, himself a rebellious aristocrat, described such strife around 600 B.C.: “Let's forget our anger; let's quit our heart-devouring strife and civil war, which some god has stirred up among us, ruining the people but bestowing the glory on our tyrant for which he prays.” In short, the title tyrant in Archaic Greece did not automatically label a ruler as brutal or unwelcome, as the use of the same word in English implies. Greeks evaluated tyrants as good or bad depending on their behavior as rulers.

It was a traditional Greek practice to explain significant historical changes such as the founding of communities or the codification of law as the work of an individual “inventor” from the distant past. Just like the Spartans, for whom the legendary Lycurgus Hdt. 1.65.2 was remembered as the founder of their city-state, the Athenians also believed their polis owed its start to a single man in the distant past. Athenian legends made Theseus Thuc. 2.15.2, Plut. Thes. 3.1 responsible for founding the polis of Athens at a remote date by the synoecism of villages in Attica, the name given to the peninsula at the southeastern corner of the mainland of Greece that formed the territory of the Athenian polis. Since Attica had several fine ports along its coast, the Athenians were much more oriented to seafaring and communication with other peoples than were the almost-landlocked Spartans. Theseus made an appropriate mythical founder because he was described as a traveling adventurer, sailing, for example, to the island of Crete to defeat the Minotaur Apollod. 3.1.4, Plut. Thes. 15.2-16, ,

Unlike most other important sites inhabited in the Mycenaean period, Athens had apparently not suffered any catastrophic destruction at the end of the Mycenaean period. Nevertheless, it is difficult to believe that Athens wholly escaped the troubles of this period, and its population shrank in the early Dark Age. By around 850 B.C., however, archaeological evidence such as the model granary from a woman's burial TRM OV 4.3 mentioned elsewhere in the Overview shows that the Athenian agricultural economy was reviving. When the population of Attica apparently expanded at a phenomenal rate during the century from about 800 to 700 B.C., the free peasants constituted the fastest-growing segment of the population as economic conditions improved in the early Archaic Age. These small agricultural producers apparently began to insist on having a say in making Athenian policies because they felt justice demanded at least a limited form of political equality. Some of these modest land owners became wealthy enough afford to afford hoplite TRM OV 5.16 armor, and these men probably made strong demands on the aristocrats who had previously ruled Athens as what amounted to a relatively broad oligarchy Aristot. Ath. Pol. 3, Plut. Thes. 32.1 . Rivalries among the aristocrats for status and material wealth prevented them from presenting a united front, and they had to respond to these pressures to insure the allegiance of the hoplites, on whom depended Athenian military strength.

By the late seventh century B.C., Athens' male citizens rich, middle-class, and poor had established the first beginnings of a limited form of democratic government Aristot. Ath. Pol. 3-4, Plut. Thes. 24.2 . Determining why they moved toward democracy instead of, for example, toward a narrow oligarchy like that of Sparta remains a difficult problem. Two factors perhaps encouraging the emergence of the Athenian polis as an incipient democracy were rapid population growth and a rough sense of egalitarianism among male citizens that survived from the frontier-like conditions of the early Dark Age, when most people had shared the same meager existence. These same factors, however, do not necessarily differentiate Athens from other city-states that did not evolve into democracies because the same conditions pertained across the Greek world in the Archaic Age. Perhaps population growth was so rapid among Athenian peasants that they had greater power than at other places to demand a share in governing. Their power and political coherence was evident, for example, in about 632 B.C. when they rallied “from the fields in a body” to foil the attempted coup of an Athenian nobleman named Cylon Hdt. 5.71, Thuc. 1.126.3 . A former champion in the Olympics and married to a daughter of Theagenes, tyrant of Megara, Cylon and some of his aristocratic friends had planned to install a tyranny. Athens also had some influential aristocrats like Solon and Cleisthenes who worked to strengthen Athenian democracy for differing reasons.

The scanty evidence seems to indicate that by the seventh century all free-born adult male citizens of Athens had the right to attend open meetings, in a body called the assembly Aristoph. Ach. 19 (ekklesia ), which elected nine magistrates called archons (rulers) each year. The archons, still all aristocrats in this early period, headed the government Aristot. Ath. Pol. 3, Plut. Thes. 24.2 and rendered verdicts in disputes and criminal accusations. As they had earlier, aristocrats at this time still dominated Athenian political life by using their influence to secure election as archons , perhaps by marshaling their traditional bands of followers as supporters and by making alliances with other aristocrats. The right of middle-class and poor men to serve as members of the assembly as yet had only limited value because little business besides the election of archons was conducted in its gatherings, which probably met rarely in this period and then only when the current archons decided the time was right.

Aristocratic political alliances often proved temporary in Athenian politics, as elsewhere, and rivalries among aristocrats jealous of each other's status continued under early Athenian democracy. In the aftermath of Cylon's attempted tyranny, an Athenian named Draco was appointed in 621 B.C., perhaps after pressure by the hoplites, to establish a code of laws promoting stability and equity. Unfortunately, Draco's laws Aristot. Pol. 2.1274b, Aristot. Ath. Pol. 4, Plut. Sol. 17.1 somehow further destabilized the political situation; the Athenians later remembered them as having been as harsh as the meaning of his name (drakon, “dragon, serpent”), and our word Draconian, meaning excessively severe, reflects this view. A deterioration in the well-being of Athens's free peasants, which had been slowly building for a long time, also further undermined social peace. Later Athenians did not know what had caused this economic crisis, only that it pitted the rich against the middle-class and the poor. Plut. Sol. 13.2

One cause of the economic crisis that plagued Athens in the later seventh century around the time of Draco TRM OV 6.22 may have been that the precariousness of agriculture in this period could sometimes lead to the gradual accumulation of the available farm land in the hands of fewer and fewer people. In subsistence agriculture, the level at which many Athenian farmers operated, a lean year could mean starvation. Moreover, farmers lacked any easy method to convert the surplus of a good year into imperishable capital, such as coined money, which could be then be stored up to offset bad years in the future, because coinage was not even invented until late in the seventh-century B.C. Hdt. 1.94.1 in Lydia in Anatolia and took a long time to become common in Greece. Failed farmers had to borrow food and seed to survive. When they could borrow no more, they had to leave their land to find a job to support their families, most likely by laboring for successful farmers. Under these conditions, farmers who became more effective than others, or simply more fortunate, could acquire the use and even the ownership of the land of failed farmers. In any case, many poor Athenians had apparently lost control of their land to wealthier proprietors by the late seventh century. The crisis became so acute that impoverished peasants were even being sold into slavery to pay off debts Aristot. Ath. Pol. 5-6, Plut. Sol. 13.2 . Finally, twenty-five years after Draco's legislation, conditions had become so acute that a civil war threatened to break out.

In desperation, the Athenians in 594 B.C. gave Solon special authority to revise their laws Aristot. Ath. Pol. 5-12, Plut. Sol. 15-25 to deal with the economic crisis and its dire social consequences that had brought their society to the brink of internecine war. As he explains in his autobiographical poetry, Solon tried to steer a middle course Plut. Sol. 15.1 between the demands of the rich to preserve their financial advantages and the call of the poor for a redistribution of land to themselves from the holdings of the large landowners. His famous “shaking off of obligations” Aristot. Ath. Pol. 6.1, Plut. Sol. 15.3 somehow freed those farms whose ownership had become formally encumbered without, however, actually redistributing any land. He also forbade the selling of Athenians into slavery for debt and secured the liberation of citizens who had become slaves Plut. Sol. 15.5 in this way, commemorating his success in the verses he wrote about his reforms: “To Athens, their home established by the gods, I brought back many who had been sold into slavery, some justly, some not ...” Aristot. Ath. Pol. 12.4

Attempting to balance political power between rich and poor, , Solon ranked male citizens into four classes according to their income Aristot. Ath. Pol. .3-4, Plut. Sol. 18.1-2 : “five-hundred-measure men” (pentakosiomedimnoi , those with an annual income equivalent to that much agricultural produce), “horsemen” (hippeis , income of three hundred measures), “yoked men” (zeugitai , two hundred measures), and “laborers” (thetes, less than two hundred measures). The higher a man's class, the higher the governmental office for which he was eligible, with the laborer class barred from all posts. Solon did reaffirm the right of this class to participate in the assembly (ekklesia ), however. Solon probably created a council (boule) of four hundred Aristot. Ath. Pol. 8.4, Plut. Sol. 19.1 men to prepare an agenda for the discussions in the assembly, although some scholars place this innovation later than Solon's time. Aristocrats could not dominate the council's deliberations because its members were chosen by lot, probably only from the top three income classes. Solon may also have initiated a schedule of regular meetings for the assembly. These reforms gave added impetus to the assembly's legislative role and thus indirectly laid a foundation for the political influence that the “laborer” (thete ) class would gradually acquire over the next century and a half.

Despite the restriction on office holding by the lowest income class, Solon's classification scheme supported further development of conditions leading to democracy because it allowed for upward social mobility: if a man managed to increase his income, he could move up the scale of eligibility for office. The absence of direct taxes on income made it easier for entrepreneurial citizens to better their lot. From Solon's reforms, Athenian male citizens gained a political and social system far more open to individual initiative and change than that of Sparta.

Equally important to restoring stability in a time of acute crisis was Solon's ruling that any male citizen could bring charges on a wide variety of offenses against wrongdoers on behalf of any victim of a crime. Aristot. Ath. Pol. 9.1, Plut. Sol. 18.5 Furthermore, he provided for the right of appeal Aristot. Ath. Pol. 9.1, Plut. Sol. 18.2 to the assembly by persons who believed a magistrate had rendered unjust judgments against them. With these two measures, Solon made the administration of justice the concern of ordinary citizens and not just of still predominately aristocratic magistrates. He balanced these judicial reforms favoring the people, however, by granting broader powers to the “Council which meets on the Hill of the god of war Ares,” the Areopagus (meaning “Ares' hill”). Archons became members of the Areopagus Aristot. Ath. Pol. 3.6, Plut. Sol. 19.1

For its place and time, Athens' emerging democracy was remarkable, even at this early stage in its development, because it granted all male citizens the possibility of participating meaningfully in the making of laws and the administration of justice. But not everyone found the system admirable. A visiting foreign king is reputed to have expressed the scornful opinion that he found Athenian democracy ludicrous. Plut. Sol. 5.3 Observing the procedure in the Athenian assembly, he expressed his amazement that leading aristocratic politicians could only recommend policy in their speeches, while the male citizens as a whole voted on what to do: “I find it astonishing,” he remarked, “that here wise men speak on public affairs, while fools decide them.” Some Athenians who agreed with the king that aristocrats were wise and the poor foolish did their best to undermine Solon's reforms Aristot. Ath. Pol. 12.5-13.1, Plut. Sol. 29.1 after their creation in 594 B.C., and such oligarchic sympathizers continued to challenge Athenian democracy at intervals throughout its history.

Strife among aristocrats, combined with the continuing discontent of the poorest Athenians, lay behind the period of strife in the mid-sixth century following Solon's reforms that led to Athens' first tyranny. At this time an Athenian aristocrat named Pisistratus Hdt. 1.59-1.64, Aristot. Ath. Pol. 14-16, Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Pisistratus, began a violent effort to make himself sole ruler with the help of his upper-class friends and the poor, whose interests he championed. He finally established himself securely as tyrant at Athens in 546 B.C. Pisistratus made funds available to help peasants acquire needed farm equipment and provided employment for poorer men while benefiting Athens by building roads and initiating major public works, such as a great temple to Zeus and fountains to increase the supply of drinking water. The tax that he imposed on agricultural production Thuc. 6.54.5-6 , one of the rare instances of direct taxation in Athenian history, financed the loans to farmers and the building projects. He also arranged for judicial officials to go on circuits through the outlying villages of Attica to hear cases, thus saving farmers the trouble of having to leave their fields to seek justice in Athens, the urban center of the polis. Like the earlier tyrants of Corinth, he promoted the economic, cultural, and architectural development of Athens. Athenian pottery, for example, now began to crowd out Corinthian in the export trade.

Hippias Thuc. 6.55.1, , the eldest son of Pisistratus, continued the tyranny after his father's death in 527 B.C. He governed by making certain that his relatives and friends occupied magistracies, but for a time he also allowed his aristocratic rivals to hold office, thereby defusing some of the tension created by their jealousy of his superior status. Eventually, however, the aristocratic family of the Alcmaeonids arranged to have the Spartans send an army to expel Hippias. Hdt. 5.62, Thuc. 6.59.4

In the ensuing vacuum of power at Athens after the expulsion of the tyrant Hippias, the leading member of the aristocratic Alcmaeonid family, a man named Cleisthenes, sought support among the masses by promising dramatic democratic reforms. The promise of such reforms seems to have been a response to the success of Cleisthenes' bitterest rival, Isagoras, an aristocrat from a different family, in becoming archon in 508 B.C. Cleisthenes had apparently despaired of winning political success other than by appealing to the non-aristocratic masses at Athens. When Isagoras tried to block Cleisthenes' reforms Hdt. 5.66.1, Aristot. Ath. Pol. 20 by calling in the Spartans again, the Athenian people united to force Isagoras and his Laconian allies out Hdt. 5.72 . The ensuing conflict between Athens and Sparta ended quickly but sowed the seeds of mutual distrust between the two city-states.

His popular support gave Cleisthenes the authority to begin to install the democratic system for which Athens has become famous, and the importance of his reforms Hdt. 5.66.2, Aristot. Ath. Pol. 21-22.2 led later Athenians to think of him as a principal founder of their democracy. First, he made the pre-existing villages of the countryside and the neighborhoods of the city of Athens (both called “demes Hdt. 5.69.2 ,” demoi ) the constituent units of Athenian political organization. Organized in their demes, the male citizens participated directly in the running of their government: they kept track in deme registers of which males were citizens and therefore eligible at eighteen to attend the assembly to vote on laws and public policies. The demes in turn were grouped for other administrative functions into ten so-called tribes (phylai ), replacing an earlier division into four tribes. Cleisthenic democracy used its ten tribes for purposes such as choosing fifty representatives by lot from each tribe to serve for one year on the council (boule ) of five hundred, which replaced Solon's council of four hundred. The number of representatives from each deme was proportional to its population. Athenian men were also called up for service in the citizen militia by tribal affiliation. Most importantly, the ten men who served each year as “generals” (strategoi ), the officials with the highest civil and military authority, were elected one from each tribe. Cleisthenes' reorganization was complex, but its general aim seems to have been to undermine existing political alliances among aristocrats in the interests of greater democracy.

By about 500 B.C. Cleisthenes had succeeded in devising an Athenian democracy based on direct participation by as many adult male citizens as possible. That he could put such a system in place successfully in a time of turmoil and have it endure, as it did, means that he must have been building on pre-existing conditions favorable to democracy. Certainly, as an aristocrat looking for popular support, Cleisthenes had reason to invent the kind of system he thought ordinary people wanted. That he based his system on the demes, the great majority of which were country villages, suggests that some conditions favoring democracy may have stemmed from the traditions of village life. Possibly, the notion of wide-spread participation in government gained support from the custom village residents often have of dealing with each other on relatively egalitarian terms. That is, each man in a village is entitled to his say in running local affairs and must persuade, not compel, others of the wisdom of his recommendations. Since many aristocrats increasingly seem to have preferred to reside in the city, their ability to dominate discussion in the demes was reduced. In any case, the idea that persuasion Plat. Gorg. 454b, Plat. Apol. 17a, Aesch. Eum. 970 , rather than force or status, should constitute the mechanism for political decision-making in the emerging Athenian democracy fit well with the spirit of the intellectual changes which were taking place during the late Archaic Age. That is, the idea that people had to present plausible reasons for their recommendations corresponded to one of the period's new ways of thought. This development has proved one of the most influential legacies of Greek civilization.

Poetry represented the only form of Greek literature until the late Archaic Age. The earliest Greek poetry, that of Homer and Hesiod, had been confined to a single rhythm. A much greater rhythmic diversity characterized the new form of poetry, called lyric, that emerged during the Archaic Age. (These texts are not yet available to Perseus.) Lyric poems were far shorter than the narrative poetry of Homer or the didactic poetry of Hesiod, and they encompassed many forms and subjects, but they were always performed with the accompaniment of the lyre Hdt. 1.24.5, Perseus Encyclopedia entry for lyres, , (a kind of harp that gives its name to the poetry). Choral poets like Alcman Paus. 3.15.2 of Sparta wrote songs to be performed by groups on public occasions to honor the gods, to celebrate famous events in a city-state's history, for wedding processions, and to praise victors in athletic contests. Lyric poets writing songs for solo performance on social occasions stressed a personal level of expression on a variety of topics. Solon and Alcaeus Hdt. 5.95 , for example, wrote poems focused on contemporary politics. Others self-consciously adopted a critical attitude toward traditional values such as strength in war. For instance, Sappho Hdt. 2.135.1, Strab. 10.2.9 C 452 , a lyric poet from Lesbos born about 630 B.C. and famous for her poems on love, wrote, “Some would say the most beautiful thing on our dark earth is an army of cavalry, others of infantry, others of ships, but I say it's whatever a person loves.” In this poem Sappho was expressing her longing for a woman she loved, who was now far away. Archilochus Hdt. 1.12.2 of Paros, whose lifetime probably fell in the early seventh century, became famous for his range of poems on themes as diverse as friends lost at sea, mockery of martial valor, and love gone astray. The bitter power of his poetic invective reportedly caused a father and his two daughters to commit suicide when Archilochus ridiculed them in anger after the father had put an end to Archilochus's affair with his daughter Neobule. Some modern literary critics think the poems about Neobule and her family are fictional, not autobiographical, and were meant to display Archilochus's dazzling talent for “blame poetry,” the mirror image of lyric as the poetry of praise. Mimnermus of Colophon Strab. 14.1.28 C 643 , another seventh century lyric poet, rhapsodized about the glory of youth and lamented its brevity, “no longer than the time the sun shines on the plain.” Lyric poetry's focus on the individual's feelings represented a new stage in Greek literary sensibilities, one that continues to inspire poets.

Thinkers usually referred to today as philosophers, but who could equally well be described as theoretical scientists studying the physical world, gave impetus to new ways of thinking in the late Archaic age. These thinkers, who came from the city-states of Ionia TRM OV 3.1 along the eastern Aegean coast, were developing radically new explanations of the world of human beings and its relation to the world of the gods. In this way began the study of philosophy in Greece. Ionia's geographical location next to the non-Greek civilizations of Anatolia, which were in contact with the older civilizations of Egypt and the Near East, meant Ionian thinkers were in a position to acquire knowledge and intellectual inspiration from their neighbors Hdt. 2.109.3, Plat. Laws 819a in the eastern Mediterranean area. Since Greece in this period had no formal schools at any level, thinkers like those from Ionia had to make their ideas known by teaching pupils privately and giving public lectures. They also used writing to record their doctrines, and some of them developed prose in Greek to express their new ways of thought. Some Ionian thinkers composed poetry as well to explain their theories and gave public recitations of their works. People who studied with these thinkers or heard their presentations would then help to spread knowledge of the new ideas.

Knowledge from the ancient Near East influenced the Ionian thinkers, just as it had influenced Greek artists of the Archaic Age. Greek vase painters and specialists in decorating metal vessels imitated Near Eastern designs depicting animals and luxuriant plants; Greek sculptors produced narrative reliefs like those of Assyria and statues with the stiff, frontal poses familiar from Egyptian precedents; Egypt also gave inspiration to Greek architects to employ stone for columns, ornamental details, and, eventually, entire buildings. In a similar process of the transfer of knowledge from east to west, information about the regular movements of the stars and planets developed by astronomers in Babylonia proved especially important in helping Ionian thinkers reach their conclusions about the nature of the physical world. The first of the Ionian theorists, Thales Hdt. 1.170.3, Hdt. 1.74.2, Hdt. 1.75.3, Strab. 14.1.7 C 635 (c. 625 - 545 B.C.) from the city-state of Miletus , was said to have predicted a solar eclipse in 585 B.C., an accomplishment implying he had been influenced by Babylonian learning. Modern astronomers doubt Thales actually could have predicted an eclipse, but the story shows how influential eastern scientific and mathematical knowledge was to the thinkers of Ionia. Working from knowledge such as the observed fact that celestial bodies moved in a regular pattern, scientific thinkers like Thales and Anaximander (c. 610- 540 B.C.), also from Miletus, drew the revolutionary conclusion that the physical world was regulated by a set of laws of nature rather than by the arbitrary intervention of divine beings. Pythagoras Hdt. 4.95.1, Plat. Rep. 600b , who emigrated from Samos to south Italy about 530 B.C., taught that the entire world was explicable through numbers. His doctrines inspired systematic study of mathematics and the numerical aspects of musical harmony.

The Ionian thinkers insisted that the workings of the universe could be explained because the phenomena of nature were neither random nor arbitrary. The universe, the totality of things, they named cosmos Plat. Gorg. 508a, Greek dictionary entry for cosmos because this word meant an orderly arrangement that is beautiful (hence our word “cosmetic”). The order characteristic of the cosmos, perceived as lovely because it was ordered, encompassed not only the motions of the heavenly bodies but also everything else: the weather, the growth of plants and animals, human health and psychology, and so on. Since the universe was ordered, it was intelligible; since it was intelligible, explanations of events could be discovered by thought and research. The thinkers who conceived this view believed it necessary to give reasons for their conclusions and to persuade others by arguments based on evidence. They believed, in other words, in logic (a word derived from the Greek term logos Plat. Crito 46b, Plat. Laws 714d, Greek dictionary entry for logos meaning, among other things, a reasoned explanation). This way of thought based on reason represented a crucial first step toward science and philosophy as these disciplines endure today. The rule-based view of the causes of events and physical phenomena developed by these thinkers contrasted sharply with the traditional mythological view of causation. Naturally, many people had difficulty accepting such a startling change in their understanding of the world, and the older tradition explaining events as the work of gods lived on alongside the new ideas.

The ideas of the Ionian thinkers probably spread slowly because no means of mass communication existed, and few men could afford to spend the time to become followers of these thinkers and then return home to explain these new ways of thought to others. Magic Hom. Od. 10.210, Hes. Th. 418, Aristoph. Cl. 749, Plat. Laws 933b remained an important preoccupation in the lives of the majority of ordinary people, who retained their notions that gods and demons frequently and directly affected their fortunes and health as well as the events of nature. Despite their perhaps limited immediate effect on the ancient world at large, the Ionian thinkers had initiated a tremendously important development in intellectual history: the separation of scientific thinking from myth and religion. Some modern scholars call this development the birth of rationalism, but it would be unfair to label myths and religious ways of thought as irrational if that term is taken to mean “unthinking” or “silly.” Ancient people realized that their lives were constantly subject to forces beyond their control and understanding, and it was not unreasonable to attribute supernatural origins to the powers of nature or the ravages of disease. The new scientific ways of thought insisted, however, that observable evidence had to be sought and theories of explanation had to be logical. Just being old or popular no longer bestowed veracity on a story purporting to explain natural phenomena. In this way, the Ionian thinkers parted company with the traditional ways of thinking of the ancient Near East as found in its rich mythology and repeated in the myths of early Greece.

Developing the view that people must give reasons to explain what they believe to be true, rather than just make assertions that they expect others to believe without evidence, was the most important achievement of the early Ionian thinkers. Along with the invention of democracy based on citizenship, their achievement gave real distinction to the Greek Archaic Age. The insistence of the Ionian thinkers on rationality, coupled with the belief that the world could be understood as something other than the plaything of divine whim, gave human beings hope that they could improve their lives through their own efforts. As Xenophanes Plat. Soph. 242d from Colophon (c. 580 - 480 B.C.), put it, “The gods have not revealed all things from the beginning to mortals, but, by seeking, human beings find out, in time, what is better.” Xenophanes, like other Ionian thinkers, believed in the existence of gods, but he nevertheless assigned the opportunity and the responsibility for improving human life squarely to human beings themselves. Human beings themselves were to “find what is better.”

The greatest military danger ever to threaten ancient Athens began with a diplomatic misunderstanding. In 507 B.C the Athenians sent ambassadors Hdt. 5.73 to ask for a protective alliance with the king of Persia, Darius I (ruler between 522-486 B.C.), because they feared that the Spartans would try to intervene in support of the Athenian aristocratic faction opposed to democracy, which opposed the political reforms of the time promoting added democracy at Athens that were the brainchild of the Athenian Cleisthenes. Hdt. 5.66, Hdt. 5.69 This ill-fated diplomatic mission unwittingly set in motion a sequence of events that culminated in invasions of mainland Greece by the huge army and navy of the king of Persia, who could summon vast numbers of fighting men from the many different peoples under his rule.

The growth of Persian power had begun when Cyrus Hdt. 1.46-91, Hdt. 1.95-130 ( ruler between 560-530 B.C.) established himself as the first Persian king. Previously, the Persians had been ruled by the Medes Hdt. 1.123-130 , a related people whose original territory occupied what is now northern Iran. The Greeks indeed often used the term “Mede” to refer to Persians. The ancestral homeland of the Persians themselves was found to the south of what is now the country of Iran. The Iranian language of today remains a descendant of ancient Persian, in contrast to the Arabic now spoken in neighboring Iraq and other countries of the Near East. By the reign of Darius I Becomes king-Hdt. 3.67 from 522 to 486, the Persian Kingdom had expanded to encompass a vast territory of heterogeneous populations stretching east-west from what is now Afghanistan to Turkey, and north-south from the southern territory of the former U.S.S.R. to Egypt and the Indian Ocean. The Persian king governed this immense area through a system of provincial organization, whose chief administrators were governors, called satraps Hdt. 3.89 , like the one whom the Athenian ambassadors met in Sardis. A satrap was a powerful figure in his own right, ruling over his province like a monarch.

The most famous series of wars in ancient Greek history—the so-called Persian Wars which took place in the 490s and in 480-479—broke out when the Persian king decided to punish Greek states he regarded as rebellious subjects. The trouble started with a revolt in Ionia Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Ionia, Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Miletus, , on the west coast of Anatolia (modern Turkey), where the Greek city-states had earlier come under Persian control.

Their newly-won confidence heartened the Athenians to join the resistance against the gigantic Persian invasion which arrived in Greece in 480 B.C. Darius had vowed the invasion as revenge for the defeat at Marathon, but it took so long to marshall forces from all over the far-flung Persian kingdom that he died before it could be launched. His son, Xerxes I Hdt. 7.2-4 (*486-465) led the massive invasion force Hdt. 7.5-6 of infantry and ships against the Greek mainland. So huge was Xerxes' army Hdt. 7.60-99 , the Greeks later claimed, it required seven days and seven nights of continuous marching to cross the Hellespont Hdt. 7.56 strait between Anatolia and the Greek mainland on a temporary bridge lashed together from boats and pontoons. Xerxes expected the Greek states simply to surrender without a fight once they realized the size of his forces. Many of them did Hdt. 7.6, Hdt. 7.130, Hdt. 7.132, Hdt. 7.150-152, Hdt. 8.3-4, Hdt. 9.12 , especially the ones in northern Greece along the route of the Persian army's march. A coalition of thirty-one Greek states Hdt. 7.202-203, Hdt. 8.1, Hdt. 8.43-48, Hdt. 8.82, Hdt. 9.28, Paus. 5.23.1-2 decided to fight, however, with the Spartans chosen as leaders because they constituted Greece's most formidable hoplite army.

The Greeks' superior armor and weapons and their adroit use of topography to counterbalance the enemy's greater numbers explain their victories from a military perspective. What is truly remarkable about the Persian Wars, however, is that the citizen militias of the thirty-one Greek city-states decided to fight in the first place. They could have surrendered and agreed to become Persian subjects to save themselves. Instead, eager to defend their freedom despite the risks and encouraged to fight by the citizens of their communities, these Greeks chose to strive together against apparently overwhelming odds. Since the Greek forces included not only aristocrats and hoplites (who had to be financially capable of supplying their own armor and weapons), but also thousands of poorer men who rowed the warships, the effort against the Persians cut across social and economic divisions. The decision by Greeks to fight the Persian Wars demonstrated courage inspired by a deep devotion to the ideal of the political freedom Hdt. 8.143.1 of the city-state, which had emerged in the preceding Archaic Age.

The victorious Greeks decided in 478 B.C. to continue a naval alliance in order to attack the Persian outposts that still existed in far northern Greece and western Anatolia, especially Ionia. The Spartans naturally assumed leadership of this alliance, continuing the position that they had held at the had of the Greek coalition formed to resist the invasion of Xerxes. The conduct of the Spartan commander, Pausanias Hdt. 5.32, Thuc. 1.94-95, Thuc. 1.130, Plut. Cim. 6 , soon caused disaffection among the Greek allies, however, and Athens soon took over the position of hegemon (leader by consensus) of the alliance. This change in leadership marked the beginning of the establishment of what would become an Athenian Empire.

Since poorer men powered Athens' fleet as rowers and since Athenian empire rested on naval power, the military and political importance of poorer men grew at Athens in the decades following the Persian Wars. As these poorer citizens came to recognize that they provided the foundation of Athenian security and prosperity, they evidently felt the time had come to make the administration of justice Boegehold's case study on Athenian judicial system at Athens just as democratic as the process of making policy and passing laws in the assembly, TRM OV 6.22, Makeup of Assembly: Aristot. Ath. Pol. 43.4-2.44 which was open to all male citizens over eighteen years old. Equally democratic in its selection was the membership of the council Aristot. Ath. Pol. 43.2, Aesch. Eum. 570, of 500 (boule), which prepared the assembly's agenda and performed other public business including some judicial functions. The council was filled each year by drawing lots to select the year's membership in the council from among male citizens over thirty years of age. The use of the lot was felt to be democratic because it gave an equal chance to all eligible men to be selected for government office. Although at this time the assembly could serve as a court of appeals, most judicial verdicts were rendered by the city-state's nine annual magistrates Aristot. Ath. Pol. 55.1 (archons) and the Areopagus Aristot. Ath. Pol. 57.3-4, Aristot. Ath. Pol. 60.2-3

The idea that democracy was best served by involving a cross-section of the male citizenry received further backing in the 450s B.C. from the measures proposed to the assembly by a wealthy aristocract named Pericles (c. 495-429 B.C.), whose mother had been the niece of the famous democratic reformer Cleisthenes. Pericles successfully proposed that state revenues be used to pay a daily stipend Plut. Per. 9.2-3, Aristot. Ath. Pol. 27.3 to men who served on juries, in the Council of the Five Hundred, and in other public offices filled by lot. The stipend was modest, in fact less than a skilled worker could have made on a good day. Without the stipend, however, poorer men would have found it virtually impossible to leave their regular work to serve in these positions, which required much of a man's time. By contrast, the board of ten annually elected generals Aristot. Ath. Pol. 61.1-2 —the most influential public officials, who had broad responsibilities for the city-state's military, civil, and financial affairs—were to receive no stipends despite the heavy demands of their post. Mainly rich men like Pericles won election as generals because they were supposed to have been able to afford the education and training required to handle this top job and to have the personal wealth to serve without financial compensation. They were compensated by the prestige conferred by election to their office. Like Cleisthenes before him, Pericles was an aristocrat who became the most influential leader in the Athens of his era by devising innovations to strengthen the egalitarian tendencies of Athenian democracy. Pericles and others of his economic status had inherited enough wealth to spend their time in politics without worrying about money, but remuneration for poorer men serving in public offices was an essential foundation of Athenian democracy, if it was truly going to be open to the majority of men, who, along with their wives and children, had to work to support themselves and their families. Above all, Pericles' proposal that jurors receive state stipends made him overwhelmingly popular with the mass of ordinary male citizens. Consequently, he was able to introduce dramatic changes in Athenian domestic and foreign policy beginning in the 450s B.C.

The Peloponnesian War put a stop to the most spectacular demonstration of the confidence and pride that Pericles and his fellow citizens felt in their city-state during the height of the Golden Age in the 440s and 430s B.C. In the early 440s B.C. the assembly accepted Pericles' recommendation to initiate a public building program Plut. Per. 12-13.10, Paus. 1.22.4

Athenian women , Perseus Encyclopedia entry for woman (women), , exercised power and earned status both in private life and public, through their roles in the family and religion respectively. Their absence from politics, however, meant that their contributions to the city-state might well be overlooked by men. One heroine in a fragmentary tragedy by Euripides, , vigorously expresses this judgment in a famous speech denouncing men who denigrate women: “Empty is the slanderous blame men place on women; it is no more than the twanging of a bowstring without an arrow; women are better than men, and I will prove it: women make agreements without having to have witnesses to guarantee their honesty ... Women manage the household and preserve its valuable property. Without a wife, no household is clean or happily prosperous. And in matters pertaining to the gods—this is our most important contribution—we have the greatest share. In the oracle at Delphi , TRM OV 5.12 we propound the will of Apollo, and at the oracle of Zeus at Dodona , , Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Dodona we reveal the will of Zeus to any Greek who wishes to know it.” Euripides portrays his heroine Medea Eur. Med. 248-251 as insisting that women who bear children are due respect at least commensurate with that granted men who fight as hoplites: “People say that we women lead a safe life at home, while men have to go to war. What fools they are! I would much rather fight in the phalanx three times than give birth to a child only once.”

The norms of respectable behavior in ancient Athens for both women and men were primarily taught not in school, but by the family Aristoph. Lys. 1125-7, and in the countless episodes of everyday life. Formal education in the modern sense indeed hardly existed because schools subsidized by the state did not exist. Privately-paid instructors

The history of the Peloponnesian War reveals both the unpredictability of war in general and the particular consequences of the repeated unwillingness of the Athenian assembly to negotiate peace terms with the other side. The other side of that same coin, of course, is the remarkable resilience shown by Athens in recovering from disastrous defeats and losses of population. Athens kept fighting no matter how dismal the situation until the very moment that an unbreakable Spartan blockade locked the city in a strangle hold in 404. The losses in population and property that Athens suffered in the war had a disastrous, albeit temporary, effect on its international power, revenues, and social cohesiveness.

The Peloponnesian War exacted a toll on the domestic life of Athenians as well as on their city-state's political harmony and international power. The Spartan invasions of the Athenian countryside forced crowds of country dwellers into the cramped confines of the city behind its defensive walls. Many people both urban and rural found their livelihoods threatened by the economic dislocations of the war. Women without wealth whose spouses or male relatives were killed in the war experienced particularly difficult times because dire necessity forced them to seek work outside the home to support themselves and their children. The expenses of the war drained the state treasury. Often reflecting in its plots the social, economic, and political tensions created by the war, Athenian comedy as a public art form revealed the depth of anxiety that the war's difficulties created and an indomitable confidence in the ingenuity and initiative of the people of Athens in finding solutions to their problems.

Many Athenian households lost fathers, sons, or brothers to the violence of battle in the Peloponnesian War, but resourceful families found ways to compensate for the economic strain that such personal tragedies could create. An Athenian named Aristarchus Xen. Mem. 2.7.1 , for example, is reported by the writer Xenophon (c. 428-354 B.C.) to have experienced financial difficulty because the turmoil of the war had severely diminished his income and also caused his sisters, nieces, and female cousins to come live with him. He found himself unable to support this swollen household of fourteen, not counting the slaves. Aristarchus's friend Socrates (469-399 B.C.) thereupon reminded him that his female relatives knew quite well how to make men's and women's cloaks, shirts, capes, and smocks, “the work considered the best and most fitting for women,” although they had always just made clothing Xen. Ec. 7.36

Many Athenian manufactured goods were produced in households like that of Aristarchus, which turned to the production of cloth

The importation of grain , , , through Piraeus , Paus. 1.1.2, Thuc. 1.93.3, , was crucial for fourth-century Athens. Even before the war Athenian farms had been unable to produce enough Xen. Ec. 11.10 of this dietary staple to feed the population. The damage done to farm buildings and equipment during the Spartan invasions of the Peloponnesian War made the situation worse until the Athenians could make repairs. The Spartan establishment of a year-round base at Decelea Thuc. 7.19.1, TRM OV 12.1.14 near Athens from 413 to 404 B.C. had given these enemy forces an opportunity to do much more severe damage in Athenian territory than the usually short campaigns of Greek warfare ordinarily allowed. The invaders had probably even had time to cut down Athenian olive trees

All indications are that the Greek diet remained much the same over time; after the Peloponnesian War people perhaps had less than before, at least until a modicum of prosperity was restored. Athenians usually had only two meals a day, a light lunch in mid-morning and a heavier meal in the evening

The war had hurt the Athenian state economically by giving a chance for escape to many of the slaves

The conviction and execution of Socrates Plat. Apol., Xen. Apol. 1 ff, Paus. 1.22.8, Paus. 1.30.3, (469-399 B.C.), the most famous philosopher of the late fifth century B.C., became perhaps the most infamous event in the history of Athens after the Peloponnesian War because his life had been devoted to combating the idea that justice should be equated with power to work one's will. Coming, as it did, during a time of social and political turmoil, his death indicated the fragility of Athenian justice in practice. His passionate concern to discover valid guidelines for leading a just life and to prove that justice is better than injustice under all circumstances gave a new direction to Greek philosophy: an emphasis on ethics Plat. Apol. 36c . Although other thinkers before him had dealt with moral issues, especially the poets and dramatists, Socrates was the first of those thinkers called philosophers to make ethics and morality his central concern.

Compared to the sophists, Socrates lived in poverty Plat. Apol. 23c and publicly disdained material possessions, but he nevertheless managed to serve as a hoplite in the army and support a wife and several children. He may have inherited some money, and he also received gifts from wealthy admirers. He paid so little attention to his physical appearance and clothes that many Athenians regarded him as eccentric. Sporting, in his words, a stomach “somewhat too large to be convenient,” Xen. Sym. 2.19 he wore the same nondescript cloak summer and winter and scorned shoes no matter how cold the weather. His physical stamina Plat. Sym. 219e was legendary, both from his tirelessness when he served as a soldier in Athens's citizen militia and from his ability to outdrink anyone at a symposium.

Whether participating at a symposium, strolling in the agora , or watching young men exercise in a gymnasium, Socrates spent his time Xen. Mem. 1.1.10 in conversation and contemplation. In the first of these characteristics he resembled his fellow Athenians, who placed great value on the importance and pleasure of speaking with each other at length. He wrote nothing; our knowledge of his ideas comes from others' writings, especially those of his pupil Plato Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Plato, Plat. Apol. 34, Paus. 1.30.3 . Plato's dialogues, so called because they present Socrates and others in extended conversation about philosophy, portray Socrates as a relentless questioner of his fellow citizens, foreign friends, and various sophists. Socrates's questions had the unsettling aim of making his interlocutors— his partners in the conversation— examine the basic assumptions of their way of life. Employing what has come to be called the Socratic method, Socrates never directly instructs his conversational partners; instead, he leads them to draw conclusions in response to his probing questions and refutations of their assumptions.

Socrates typically began one of his conversations by asking the interlocutor for a definition of an abstract quality such as happiness or a virtue such as courage. For instance, in the dialogue entitled Plat. Lach. 190, Thuc. 3.86.1, after the Athenian general of that name who appears as one of the dialogue's interlocutors, Socrates asks Laches and another distinguished military commander what makes a citizen a brave soldier. Socrates then proceeds by further questioning to show that the definitions of courage and instances of courageous behavior stated by the interlocutors actually conflict with their other beliefs about the behavior that constituted courage.

This indirect method of searching for the truth often left Socrates's interlocutors in a state of puzzlement because they were forced to conclude that they were ignorant of what they began by assuming they knew very well. Socrates insisted that he, too, was ignorant of the best definition of virtue but that his wisdom consisted of knowing that he did not know. Plat. Phaedrus 235, Plat. Apol. 23 He was trying to improve rather than undermine his interlocutors' beliefs in morality, even though, as one of his conversationalists put it, a conversation with Socrates made a man feel numb just as if he had been stung by a stingray Plat. Meno 80a . Socrates wanted to discover through reasoning the universal standards that justified morality. He especially attacked the view of the sophists that proclaimed conventional morality the “fetters that bind nature.” Plat. Prot. 337 This view, he asserted, equated human happiness with power and “getting more.”

Socrates passionately believed that just behavior was better for human beings than injustice and that morality Plat. Apol. 30b was justified because it created happiness. Essentially, he seems to have argued that just behavior, or virtue, was identical to knowledge Xen. Mem. 3.9.5, Xen. Mem. 4.6.6 and that true knowledge of justice would inevitably lead people to choose good over evil and therefore to have truly happy lives Plat. Crito 48b , regardless of their material success. Since Socrates believed that knowledge itself was sufficient for happiness, he therefore asserted that no one knowingly behaved unjustly and that behaving justly was always in the individual's interest. It might appear, he maintained, that individuals could promote their interests by cheating or using force on those weaker than themselves, but this appearance was deceptive. It was in fact ignorance to believe that the best life was the life of unlimited power to pursue whatever one desired. Instead, the most desirable human life was concerned with virtue and guided by rational reflection Plat. Apol. 38a . Moral knowledge was all one needed for the good life, as Socrates defined it.

Although Socrates, unlike the sophists, offered no courses and took no fees Plat. Apol. 19e , his effect on many people was as upsetting as the relativistic doctrines of the sophists had been. Indeed, Socrates's refutation of his fellow conversationalists' most cherished certainties, indirectly expressed through his method of questioning, made some of his interlocutors decidedly uncomfortable. Unhappiest of all were the fathers whose sons, after listening to Socrates reduce someone to utter bewilderment, came home to try the same technique on their parents Plat. Apol. 23, Aristoph. Cl. 1399 . Men who experienced this reversal of the traditional hierarchy of education between parent and child— the son was supposed to be educated by the father— had cause to feel that Socrates's effect, even if it was not his intention, was to undermine the stability of society by questioning Athenian traditions and inspiring young men to do the same with the passionate enthusiasm of their youth. We cannot say with certainty what Athenian women thought of Socrates or he of them. His thoughts about human capabilities and behavior could be applied to women as well as to men Xen. Sym. 2.9 , and he perhaps believed that women and men both had the same basic capacity for justice. Nevertheless, the realities of Athenian society meant that Socrates circulated primarily among men and addressed his ideas to them and their situations. He is, however, reported to have had numerous conversations with Aspasia Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Aspasia, Plut. Per. 24.3, Plat. Menex. 235, Xen. Mem. 2.6.36, Aristoph. Ach. 527, , the courtesan who lived with Pericles for many years, and Plato has Socrates attribute his ideas on love to a woman, the otherwise-unknown priestess Diotima Plat. Sym. 201d of Mantinea. Whether these contacts were real or fictional devices remains uncertain.

The feeling that Socrates could be a danger to conventional society gave the comic playwright Aristophanes Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Aristophanes, the inspiration for his comedy Aristoph. Cl. 1 ff. of 423 B.C., so named from the role played by the chorus. In the play Socrates is presented as a cynical sophist who, for a fee, offers instruction in the Protagorean technique of making the weaker argument the stronger Aristoph. Cl. 882 . When the protagonist's son is transformed by Socrates's instruction into a rhetorician able to argue that a son has the right to beat his parents Aristoph. Cl. 1405 , the protagonist ends the comedy by burning down Socrates's Thinking Shop, as it is called in the play.

Athenians with qualms about Socrates found confirmation of their fears in the careers of Alcibiades Plat. Sym. 212, Dem. 61.45, Plat. Alc. 1.103, Plut. Alc. 7.3, Plut. Alc. 7.4, Plut. Alc. 1 ff, and, especially, Critias, one of the Thirty Tyrants Xen. Hell. 2.3.11 . Socrates's critics blamed him for Alcibiades's contempt for social conventions because Alcibiades had been one of Socrates's most devoted followers. Critias, another prominent follower, played a leading role in the murder and plunder perpetrated by the Thirty Tyrants in 404-403 B.C. In blaming Socrates for the crimes of Critias Xen. Hell. 2.3.15, Aeschin. 1.173, Xen. Hell. 2.3.51, Xen. Hell. 2.4.9, Xen. Mem. 1.2.24, Xen. Mem. 1.2.30, Xen. Mem. 1.2.31, Plat. Criti. 106a, , Socrates's detractors chose to overlook his defiance of the Thirty Tyrants when they had tried to involve him in their violent schemes and his utter rejection of the immorality Critias had displayed.

The hostility some Athenians felt toward Socrates after the violence of the Thirty Tyrants encouraged the distinguished Athenian Anytus Xen. Apol. 29, Andoc. 1.150, Lys. 22.9, Aristot. Ath. Pol. 27.5, Plat. Meno 90, Plut. Alc. 4.5, , who had suffered personally under this regime, to join with two other men of lesser prominence in prosecuting Socrates in 399 B.C. Since the amnesty prevented their bringing any charges Plat. Apol. 24b, Xen. Mem. 1.1.1, Xen. Apol. 10 directly related to the period of tyranny, they accused Socrates of impiety Plat. Apol. 35d . Since Athenian law did not specify precisely what offenses constituted impiety, the accusers had to convince the jurors in the case that what Socrates had done was a crime. No judge presided to rule on what evidence was admissible or how the law should be applied, as usual in Athenian trials. Speaking for themselves as the prosecutors, as also required by Athenian law, the accusers argued their case against Socrates before a jury of 501 men that had been assembled by lot from that year's pool of eligible jurors, drawn from the male citizens over thirty years old. The prosecution had both a religious and a moral component. Religiously, they accused Socrates of not believing in the gods of the city-state and of introducing new divinities. Morally, they charged, he had led the young men of Athens away from Athenian conventions and ideals. After the conclusion of the prosecutors' remarks, Socrates spoke in his own defense, as required by Athenian legal procedure. Plato presents Socrates as taking this occasion not to rebut all the charges or beg for sympathy, as jurors expected in serious cases, but to reiterate his unyielding dedication to goading his fellow citizens into examining their preconceptions Plat. Apol. 29d . This irritating process of constant questioning, he maintained, would help them learn to live virtuous lives. Furthermore, they should care not about their material possessions but about making their true selves— their souls— as good as possible Plat. Apol. 30a . He vowed to remain their stinging gadfly no matter what the consequences to himself.

After the jury narrowly voted to convict, standard Athenian legal procedure required the jurors to decide between alternative penalties proposed by the prosecutors and the defendant. Anytus and his associates proposed death. In such instances the defendant was then expected to offer exile as the alternative, which the jury would then usually accept. Socrates, however, replied that he deserved a reward rather than a punishment Plat. Apol., Xen. Apol. 1 ff, Plat. Apol. 36d , until his friends at the trial prevailed upon him to propose a fine as his penalty. The jury Plat. Apol. 36b chose death. Socrates accepted his sentence with equanimity because, as he put it in a famous paradox, “no evil can befall a good man either in life or in death.” Plat. Apol. 41 In other words, nothing can take away the knowledge that is virtue, and only the loss of that wisdom could ever count as a true evil. He was executed in the normal Athenian way Plat. Phaedo 57, Plat. Phaedo 117 , by being given a poisonous drink concocted from powdered hemlock. The silencing of Socrates did nothing, however, to restore Athenian confidence to the level of the fifth century B.C., and a later source reports that the Athenians soon came to regret the condemnation of Socrates Diod. 14.37.7 as a tragic mistake that left a blot on their reputation.

In the fifty years after the Peloponnesian War, Sparta, Thebes, and Athens fought to win a dominant position of international power in the Greek world. Athens probably never regained the same economic and military strength that it had formerly wielded in the fifth century B.C., perhaps because its silver mines TRM OV 12.2.4 were no longer producing at the same level. Nevertheless, it did recover after the re-establishment of democracy Xen. Hell. 2.4.42 in 403 B.C. and soon became a major force in international politics once again. Sparta's widespread attempts to extend its power in the years after the Peloponnesian War gave Athens and the other Greeks states ample opportunity for diplomatic and military action. In 401 B.C., the Persian satrap Cyrus, son of a previous king, hired a mercenary army to try to unseat Artaxerxes II Xen. Hell. 2.4.42, Xen. Anab. 1.1.4, Xen. Hell. 3.1.1-2, Diod. 14.19.2 , who had ascended to the Persian throne in 404. Xenophon Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Xenophon , who enlisted under Cyrus, wrote a stirring account in his Xen. Anab. of the expedition's disastrous defeat at Cunaxa Xen. Anab. 1.7.1 near Babylon and the arduous and long journey home through hostile territory Xen. Anab. 5.1.2 of the terrified Greek mercenaries from Cyrus's routed army. Sparta had supported Cyrus's rebellion, thereby arousing the hostility of Artaxerxes. The Spartan general Lysander, the victor over Athens in the last years of the Peloponnesian War, pursued an aggressive policy Xen. Hell. 3.4.2, Diod. 14.80.5, Diod. 14.97.5 in Anatolia and northern Greece, and other Spartan commanders meddled in Sicily Diod. 14.10.2-3, Diod. 14.44.2 . Thebes, Athens, Corinth, and Argos thereupon formed an anti-Spartan coalition Xen. Hell. 3.5.1-5, Diod. 14.83.1 because they saw this Spartan activity as threatening their own interests at home and abroad.

In a reversal of the alliances of the end of the Peloponnesian War Xen. Hell. 3.5.1-5, Xen. Hell. 4.2.1-2 , the Persian king initially allied with Athens and the other Greek city-states Xen. Hell. 4.4.2, Xen. Hell. 4.8.12 against Sparta in the so-called Corinthian War Xen. Hell. 4.2.10 , which lasted from 395 to 386 B.C. But this alliance failed Xen. Hell. 4.2.1 , too, because the king and the Greek allies were seeking their own advantage rather than peaceful accommodation. The war ended with Sparta once again cutting a deal with Persia. In a blatant renunciation of its claim to be the defender of Greek freedom, Sparta acknowledged the Persian king's right to control the Greek city-states of Anatolia in return for permission to secure Spartan interests in Greece without Persian interference. The King's Peace Xen. Hell. 5.1.30 of 386 B.C., as the agreement is called, effectively returned the Greeks of Anatolia to the dependent status of a century ago before the Greek victory in the Persian Wars of 490-479 B.C.

Spartan forces attacked city-states all over Greece in the years after the peace. Athens, meanwhile, had restored its invulnerability to invasion by rebuilding the long walls Thuc. 1.107-108, Plut. Cim. 13.7,

The alliances of the various city-states shifted often in the repeated conflicts that took place in Greece during these early decades of the fourth century B.C. The threat from Thessaly faded with Jason's murder Xen. Hell. 6.4.31 in 370 B.C., and the former enemies Sparta and Athens momentarily allied against the Thebans in the battle of Mantinea in the Peloponnese in 362 B.C. Thebes won the battle but lost the war when its great leader Epaminondas Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Epaminondas fell at Mantinea , Paus. 8.11.5, Xen. Hell. 7.5.15 and no credible replacement for him could be found. The Theban quest for dominance in Greece was over. Xenophon adroitly summed up the situation after 362 B.C. with these closing remarks Xen. Hell. 7.5.26-27 from the history that he wrote of the Greeks in his time ( ): “Everyone had supposed that the winners of this battle would be Greece's rulers and its losers their subjects; but there was only more confusion and disturbance in Greece after it than before.” The truth of his analysis was confirmed when the naval alliance led by Athens dissolved Diod. 16.7.3-4 in the mid-350s B.C. in a war among the leader and the allies.

All the efforts of the various major Greek states to extend their hegemony over mainland Greece in this period therefore ended in failure. By the mid 350s B.C., no Greek city-state had the power to rule more than itself on a consistent basis. The struggle for supremacy in Greece that had begun eighty years earlier with the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War had finally ended in a stalemate of exhaustion that opened the way for a new power— the kingdom of Macedonia.

Socrates's fate had a profound effect on his most brilliant follower, Plato Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Plato, Plat. L. 7.325 (ca. 428 -348 B.C.), who even though an aristocrat nevertheless withdrew from political life after 399 B.C. The condemnation of Socrates TRM OV 14.13 had apparently convinced Plato that citizens in a democracy were incapable of rising above narrow self-interest to knowledge of any universal truth. In his works dealing with the organization of society, Plato bitterly rejected democracy as a justifiable system of government. Instead, he sketched what he saw as the philosophical basis for ideal political and social structures among human beings. His utopian vision had virtually no effect on the actual politics of his time, and his attempts to advise Dionysius II Plat. L. 7.327d (ruled 367-344 B.C.), tyrant of Syracuse in Sicily, on how to rule as a true philosopher ended in utter failure. Otherwise we have almost no evidence for the events of Plato's life.

Political philosophy formed only one portion of Plato's interests, which ranged widely in astronomy, mathematics, and metaphysics (theoretical explanations for phenomena that cannot be understood through direct experience or scientific experiment). After Plato's death, his ideas attracted relatively little attention among philosophers for the next two centuries, until they were revived as important points for debate in the Roman era. Nevertheless, the sheer intellectual power of Plato's thought and the controversy it has engendered ever since his lifetime have won him fame as one of the world's greatest philosophers.

Plato seem to have disagreed with Socrates's insistence that fundamental knowledge meant moral knowledge based on inner reflection. Plato concluded that knowledge meant searching for truths that are independent of the observer and could be taught to others. He acted on this latter belief by founding the Academy Paus. 1.29.2, Paus. 1.30.3 , a shady gathering spot just outside the walls of Athens, which was named after the local hero whose shrine was nearby. The Academy was not a school or college in the modern sense but rather an informal association of people, who were interested in studying philosophy, mathematics, and theoretical astronomy with Plato as their guide. The Academy became so famous as a gathering place for intellectuals that it continued to operate for nine hundred years after Plato's death, with periods in which it was directed by distinguished philosophers and others during which it lapsed into mediocrity.

Plato Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Plato, Plat. L. 7.325 did not write philosophical treatises in the abstract fashion familiar from more recent times but rather composed works called dialogues from their form as conversations or reported conversations. Almost as if they were short plays, the dialogues have settings Plat. Euthyph. and casts of conversationalists (often including Socrates), who talk about philosophical issues. Divorcing the philosophical content of a Platonic dialogue from its literary form is no doubt a mistaken approach; a dialogue of Plato demands to be taken as a whole. The dialogues were meant to provoke readers into thoughtful reflection rather than to spoon-feed them a circumscribed set of doctrines.

Plato's views Aristot. Met. 1.987a 29g seem to have changed over time, and he nowhere presents one, coherent set of doctrines. Although it is unwise to try to summarize Plato rather than to read his dialogues as complete pieces, it is perhaps not too misleading to say that he taught that human beings cannot define and understand absolute virtues such as goodness, justice, beauty, or equality by the concrete evidence of these qualities in their lives. Any earthly examples will in another context display the opposite quality. For instance, always returning what one has borrowed might seem to be just. But what if a person who has borrowed a weapon from a friend is confronted by that friend who wants the weapon back to commit a murder? Plat. Rep. 331c In this case, returning the borrowed item would be unjust. Examples of equality are also only relative Plat. Theaet. 152a, Plat. Parm. 134a . The equality of a stick two feet long, for example, is evident when it is compared with another two-foot stick. Paired with a three-foot stick, however, it displays inequality. In sum, in the world that human beings experience with their senses, every example of the virtues and every quality is relative in some aspect of its context.

Plato refused to accept the relativity of the virtues as reality. He developed the theory that the virtues cannot be discovered through experience; rather, the virtues are absolutes that can be apprehended only by thought and that somehow exist independently of human existence. The separate realities of the pure virtues Plato referred to in some of his works as Forms Plat. Rep. 507b, Plat. Rep. 596a-b, Plat. Parm. 132d, Aristot. Met. 1.987b (sing. eidos , plur. eide , or sing. idea , plur. ideai ); among the Forms were Goodness, Justice, Beauty, and Equality. He argued that the Forms were invisible, invariable, and eternal entities located in a higher realm beyond the empirical world of human beings. The Forms such as Goodness, Justice, Beauty, and Equality are, according to Plato, true reality; what humans experience with their senses are the impure shadows of this reality.

Each Form, Plato seems to say, is an essential quality, one that people experience only through contrast between opposites. For example, that a stick embodies equality to another of the same length but inequality to a stick of a different length demonstrates equality only through contrast with the unequal stick. The Form Equality, however, is the pure essence of equality, which under no circumstances can be unequal or possess the quality of inequality. Such a pure Form is beyond human experience. The same reasoning applies to the other virtues such as goodness or beauty or justice.

Plato's concept of Forms required the further belief that knowledge of them came through the human soul, which must be immortal. When a soul is incarnated in its current body, it brings with it knowledge of the Forms. The soul then uses reason in argument and proof, not empirical observation through the senses, to recollect its pre-existent knowledge.

Plato was not consistent throughout his career in his views on the nature or the significance of Forms, and his later works seem quite divorced from the theory. Nevertheless, Forms provide a good example of both the complexity and the wide range of Platonic thought. With his theory of Forms, Plato made metaphysics a central issue for philosophers ever since.

Plato's idea that humans possessed immortal souls Plat. Phaedo 106b, Plat. Laws 743e distinct from their bodies established the concept of dualism, positing a separation between spiritual and physical being. This notion of the separateness of soul and body would play an influential role in later philosophical and religious thought. In a dialogue written late in his life, Plato said the pre-existing knowledge possessed by the immortal human soul is in truth the knowledge known to the supreme deity. Plato called this god the Demiurge Plat. Tim. 40c (“craftsman”) because the deity used knowledge of the Forms to craft the world of living beings from raw matter. According to this doctrine of Plato, a knowing, rational God created the world, and the world therefore has order. Furthermore, its beings have goals, as evidenced by animals adapting to their environments in order to flourish. The Demiurge wanted to reproduce in the material world the perfect order of the Forms, but the world as crafted turned out not to be perfect because matter is necessarily imperfect. Plato suggested that the proper goal for human beings is to seek perfect order and purity in their own souls by making rational desires control their irrational desires. The latter cause harm in various ways. The desire to drink wine to excess Plat. Phaedrus 238a , for example, is irrational because the drinker fails to consider the hangover to come the next day. Those who are governed by irrational desires thus fail to consider the future of both body and soul. Finally, since the soul is immortal and the body is not, our present, impure existence is only one passing phase in our cosmic existence.

Plato employed his theory of Forms not only in metaphysical speculation about the original creation of the everyday world in which people live but also in showing the way human society should be constructed in an ideal world. One version of Plato's utopian vision is found in his most famous dialogue, the . This work, whose Greek title ( Plat. Rep. 562a ) would be more accurately rendered as , primarily concerns the nature of justice and the reasons that people should be just instead of unjust. Justice, Plato argues, is advantageous; it consists of subordinating the irrational to the rational in the soul. By using the truly just polis as a model for understanding this notion of proper subordination in the soul, Plato presents a vision of the ideal structure for human society Plat. Rep. 368e . Like a just soul, the just society would have its parts in proper hierarchy, parts that Plato in the presents as three classes of people, as distinguished by their ability to grasp the truth of Forms. Plat. Rep. 415a The highest class constitutes the rulers, or “guardians” Plat. Rep. 412a, Plat. Rep. 428d as Plato calls them, who are educated in mathematics, astronomy, and metaphysics. Next come the “auxiliaries,” Plat. Rep. 414b whose function it is to defend the polis. The lowest class is that of the producers, Plat. Rep. 421a , who grow the food and make the objects required by the whole population. Each part contributes to society by fulfilling its proper function.

Women as well as men qualify to be guardians Plat. Rep. 453a because they possess the same virtues and abilities as men, except for a disparity in physical strength between the average woman and the average man. The axiom justifying the inclusion of women, namely that virtue is the same in women as in men Xen. Sym. 2.9 , is perhaps a notion that Plato derived from Socrates. The inclusion of women in the ruling class of Plato's utopian city-state represented a startling departure from the actual practice of his times. Indeed, never before in Western history had anyone proposed— even in fantasy— that work be allocated in human society without regard to gender. Moreover, to minimize distraction, guardians Plat. Rep. 412a, Plat. Rep. 428d are to have neither private property nor nuclear families Plat. Rep. 416d . Male and female guardians are to live in houses shared in common, to eat in the same mess halls, and to exercise in the same gymnasiums. The children are to be raised as a group in a common environment by special caretakers. Although this scheme is meant to free women guardians from child-care responsibilities and enable them to rule equally with men, Plato fails to consider that women guardians would in reality have a much tougher life than the men because they would have to be pregnant frequently and undergo the strain and danger of giving birth. At the same time, he evidently does not believe they are disqualified for ruling on this account. The guardians who achieved the highest level of knowledge in Plato's ideal society would qualify to rule over the ideally just state as philosopher-kings.

To become a guardian, a person from childhood must be educated for many years in mathematics, astronomy, and metaphysics to gain the knowledge that Plato in the presented as necessary if one was to rule for the common good. Plato's specifications for the education of guardians in fact make him the first thinker to argue systematically that education should be the training of the mind and the character rather than simply the acquisition of information and practical skills. Such a state would necessarily be authoritarian because only the ruling class would possess the knowledge to determine its policies and make decisions determining who is allowed to mate with whom to produce the best children.

The severe regulation of life that Plato proposed for his ideally just state in the was an outgrowth of his tight focus on the question of a rational person's true interest. Furthermore, he insisted that politics and ethics are fields in which objective truths can be found by the use of reason. Despite his harsh criticism of existing governments such as Athenian democracy Plat. Stat. 303b, Plat. Gorg. 515e, Plat. L. 7.324c and his scorn for the importance of rhetoric Plat. Gorg. 455e in its functioning, Plato also recognized the practical difficulties in implementing radical changes in the way people actually lived. Indeed, his late dialogue Plat. Laws 624a shows him wrestling with the question of improving the real world in a less radical, though still authoritarian, way than in the . Plato hoped that, instead of ordinary politicians, whether democrats or oligarchs, the people who know truth and can promote the common good would rule because their rule would be in everyone's real interest. For this reason above all, he passionately believed that the study of philosophy mattered to human life.

Plato's most brilliant follower was Aristotle Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Aristotle (384-322 B.C.). Aristotle's great reputation as a thinker in science and philosophy rests on his influence in promoting scientific investigation of the natural world and in developing rigorous systems of logical argument. The enormous influence of Aristotle's works on scholars in later periods, especially the Middle Ages, has made him a monumental figure in the history of western science and philosophy.

The son of a wealthy doctor from Stagira in northern Greece, Aristotle came to Athens at the age of seventeen to study in Plato's Academy TRM OV 15.2 , where he stayed until the death of Plato in 348/7. He next went to stay with Hermias Diod. 16.52.5, Aristot. Econ. 1351a 33, Strab. 13.1.57 , a ruler of towns in Mysia in western Anatolia. When Hermias fell from power and died in 345, Aristotle moved to the town of Mytilene on Lesbos, and then in 343 he took up a post at the royal court of Macedonia to tutor Alexander Paus. 6.4.8 , the son of king Philip II. By 340 he had probably returned to Stagira, and in 335 Aristotle founded his own informal philosophical school in Athens named the Lyceum Strab. 13.1.54, Paus. 1.19.3 , later called the Peripatetic School after the covered walkway (peripatos ) in which its students carried on conversations while strolling out of the glare of the Mediterranean sun. When Alexander, who had succeeded his father as Macedonian king, died in 323, anti-Macedonian feelings among the Athenians forced Aristotle to depart for Chalcis, where he died in 322.

Aristotle lectured on nearly every branch of learning: biology, medicine, anatomy, psychology, meteorology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, music, metaphysics, rhetoric, political science, ethics, literary criticism. Apparently an inspiring teacher, Aristotle encouraged his followers to conduct research in numerous fields of specialized knowledge. For example, he had student researchers compile reports Aristot. Ath. Pol. 2.1 on the systems of government of 158 Greek states. He also worked out a sophisticated system of logic for precise argumentation. Creating a careful system to identify the forms of valid arguments, Aristotle established grounds for distinguishing a logically sound case from a merely persuasive one. He first gave names to contrasts such as premise versus conclusion and the universal versus the particular that have been commonplaces of thought and speech ever since. He also studied the process of explanation itself, formulating the influential doctrine of four causes Aristot. Met. 2.994a 1, Aristot. Met. 1013b 1 . According to Aristotle, four different categories of explanation exist that are not reducible to a single, unified whole: form (defining characteristics), matter (constituent elements), origin of movement (similar to what we commonly mean by “cause”), and telos (aim or goal). This analysis exemplifies Aristotle's care never to oversimplify the complexity of reality. Some of Aristotle's most influential discussions concentrated on understanding qualitative concepts that human beings tend to take for granted, such as time, space, motion, and change. Through careful argumentation he probed the philosophical difficulties that lie beneath the surface of these familiar notions, and his views on the nature of things exercised an overwhelming influence on later thinkers.

Much of Aristotle's philosophical thought reflected the influence of Plato, but he also refined and even rejected ideas that his teacher had advocated. He denied the validity of Plato's theory of Forms Aristot. Met. 7.1033b, Aristot. Met. 7.1028b , for example, on the grounds that the separate existence that Plato postulated for them failed to make sense. This position typified Aristotle's general preference for explanations based on common sense rather than metaphysics. By modern standards his scientific thought paid relatively limited attention to mathematical models of explanation and quantitative reasoning, but mathematics in his time had not yet reached the level of sophistication appropriate for such work. His method also differed from that of modern scientists because it did not include controlled experimentation. Aristotle believed that investigators had a better chance of understanding objects and beings by observing them in their natural setting than under the artificial conditions of a laboratory. His coupling of detailed investigation with perceptive reasoning served especially well in such physical sciences as biology, botany, and zoology. For example, as the first scientist to try to collect all the available information on the animal species and to classify them, Aristotle recorded the facts about more than five hundred different kinds of animals, including insects. Many of his descriptions represented significant advances in learning. His recognition that whales and dolphins were mammals, for instance, which later writers on animals overlooked, was not rediscovered for another two thousand years. His gynecology, however, in contrast to much of his other learning, was seriously flawed.

In his zoological research Aristotle set forth his teleological view of nature— that is, he believed organisms developed as they did because they had a natural goal ( telos Aristot. Met. 2.994b 9, Aristot. Met. 5.1013a 33 in Greek), or what we might call an end or a function. To explain a phenomenon, Aristotle said that one must discover its goal— to understand “that for the sake of which” the phenomenon in question existed. A simple example of this kind of explanation is the duck's webbed feet. According to Aristotle's reasoning, ducks have webbed feet for the sake of swimming, an activity that supports the goal of a duck's existence, which is to find food in the water so as to stay alive. Aristotle argued that the natural goal of human beings Aristot. Pol. 1.1252b 28 was to live in the society of a polis and that the city-state came into existence to meet the human need to live together, since individuals living in isolation cannot be self-sufficient. Furthermore, existence in a city-state made possible an orderly life of virtue for its citizens. The means to achieve this ordered life were the rule of law and the process of citizens' ruling and being ruled in turn.

Aristotle was conventional for his times in regarding slavery Aristot. Pol. 1.1259b, Aristot. Pol. 1.1252a, Aristot. Econ. 1.1344a as natural on the grounds that some people were by nature bound to be slaves because their souls lacked the rational part that should rule in a human being. Individuals propounding the contrary view were rare, although one fourth-century B.C. orator, Alcidamas, asserted that “God has set all men free; nature has made no one a slave.” Also in tune with his times was Aristotle's conclusion that women Aristot. Nic. Eth. 1148b 32, Aristot. Nic. Eth. 1162a, Aristot. Pol. 1259b, Aristot. Pol. 7.1335b were by nature inferior to men. His view of the inferiority of women was based on faulty notions of biology. He wrongly believed, for example, that in procreation the male with his semen actively gave the fetus its form, while the female had only the passive role of providing its matter. His assertion that females were less courageous than males was justified by dubious evidence about animals, such as the report that a male squid would stand by as if to help when its mate was speared but that a female squid would swim away when the male was impaled. Although his erroneous biology led Aristotle to evaluate females as incomplete males, he believed that human communities could be successful and happy only if they included the contributions of both women and men. Aristotle argued that marriage was meant to provide mutual help and comfort but that the husband should rule.

Aristotle sharply departed from the Socratic idea that knowledge of justice and goodness was all that was necessary for a person to behave justly. He argued that people in their souls often possess knowledge of what is right but that their irrational desires overrule this knowledge and lead them to do wrong. People who know the evils of hangovers still get drunk, for instance Aristot. Nic. Eth. 1113b, Aristot. Nic. Eth. 1114a . Recognizing a conflict of desires in the human soul, Aristotle devoted special attention to the issue of achieving self-control by training the mind to win out over the instincts and passions. Self-control did not mean denying human desires and appetites; rather, it meant striking a balance between suppressing and heedlessly indulging physical yearnings, of finding “the mean.” Aristot. Nic. Eth. 1104a 25-26, Aristot. Nic. Eth. 1133b 32, Aristot. Eud. Eth. 1220a Aristotle claimed that the mind should rule in striking this balance because the intellectual is the finest human quality and the mind is the true self, indeed the godlike part of a person.

Aristotle believed that human happiness Aristot. Nic. Eth. 1095a, Aristot. Nic. Eth. 1176a, Aristot. Pol. 3.1281a 2, Aristot. Pol. 7.1324a , which was not to be equated with the simple-minded pursuit of pleasure, stems from fulfilling human potentialities. These potentialities can be identified by rational choice, practical judgment, and recognition of the value of choosing the mean instead of extremes. The central moral problem is the nearly universal human tendency to want to “get more,” to act unjustly whenever one has the power to do so. The aim of education is to dissuade people from this inclination, which has its worst effects when it is directed at acquiring money or honor. In this context Aristotle was thinking of men in public life outside the home, and he says that the dangerous disorder caused by men's desire for “getting more” occurs both in democracies and oligarchies. The greatest threat to democracy was the teaching of the sophists that freedom is living exactly as a man likes Aristot. Pol. 6.1318b . True freedom, he stressed, consisted in ruling and being ruled in turn according to the agreed-on laws of the community Aristot. Pol. 1.1260a .

Aristotle regarded science and philosophy not as abstract subjects isolated from the concerns of ordinary existence but rather as the disciplined search for knowledge in every aspect of life. That search epitomized the kind of rational human activity that alone could bring the good life and genuine happiness. Some modern critics have replied that Aristotle's work lacks a clear moral code, but he did the study of ethics a great service by insisting that standards of right and wrong have merit only if they are grounded in character and aligned with the good in human nature and do not simply consist of lists of abstract reasons for behaving in one way rather than another. An ethical system, that is, must be relevant to the actual moral situations that human beings continually experience in their lives. In ethics, as in all his scholarship, Aristotle distinguished himself by the insistence that the life of the mind and experience of the real world were inseparable components in the quest to define a worthwhile existence for human beings.

Despite his interest in subjects such as the history of the constitutions of states and the theory and practice of rhetoric Aristot. Rh. 1354a 1 , Aristotle remained a theoretician in the mold of Plato. This characteristic set him apart from the major educational trend of the fourth century B.C., which emphasized practical wisdom and training that had direct application to the public lives of upper-class male citizens in a swiftly changing world. The most important subject in this education was rhetoric, the skill of persuasive public speaking, which itself depended not only on oratorical techniques but also on the knowledge of the world and of human psychology that speakers required to be effective. The ideas about education and rhetoric that emerged in this period exercised tremendous influence throughout the Greek and Roman eras and long thereafter.

Influential believers in the general value of practical knowledge and rhetoric were to be found even among those who had admired Socrates, who had placed no value on such matters. Xenophon, for example, knew Socrates well enough to write extensive memoirs recreating many conversations with the great philosopher Xen. Mem. 1.1.1, Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Xenophon . But he also wrote a wide range of works in history, biography, estate management, horsemanship, and the public revenues of Athens. The subjects of these treatises reveal the manifold topics that Xenophon considered essential to the proper education of young men.

The ideas of the famous Athenian orator Isocrates Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Isocrates (436-338 B.C.) exemplified the dedication to rhetoric as a practical skill that Plato rejected as utterly wrong. Isocrates was born to a rich family and studied with sophists and thinkers including Socrates. Since he lacked the voice to address large gatherings, Isocrates composed speeches for other men to deliver and sought to influence public opinion and political leaders at Athens and abroad by publishing speeches of his own in writing. He regarded education Isoc. 12.30 as the preparation for a useful life doing good in matters of public importance. He sought to develop an educational middle ground between the theoretical study of abstract ideas and purely crass training in rhetorical techniques for influencing others to one's own personal advantage. In this way he stood between the ideals of Plato and the promises of unscrupulous sophists.

Rhetoric was the skill that Isocrates sought to develop, but that development, he insisted, could come only with natural talent and the practical experience of worldly affairs that trained orators Isoc. 15.187 to understand public issues and the psychology of the people whom they had to persuade for the common good. Isocrates saw rhetoric therefore not as a device for cynical self-aggrandizement but as a powerful tool Isoc. 15.253 of persuasion for human betterment, if it was wielded by properly gifted and trained men with developed consciences. Women were of course excluded from participation because they could not take part in politics. The Isocratean emphasis on rhetoric and its application in the real world of politics won many more adherents among men in Greek and, later, Roman culture than did the Platonic vision of the philosophical life, and it would have great influence when revived in Renaissance Europe, two thousand years later.

Throughout his life Isocrates tried to put his doctrines to use by addressing works to powerful leaders whose policies he wanted to influence. In his later years he believed the state of Greece had become so unstable that he promoted the cause of Panhellenism Isoc. 4.15, Isoc. 5.9 — political harmony among the Greek states— by urging Philip II Isoc. 5.16 , king of Macedonia, to unite the Greeks under his leadership in a crusade against Persia. This radical recommendation was Isocrates's practical solution to the persistent conflicts among Greek city-states and to the social unrest created by friction between the richer communities and the many poor areas in Greece. Isocrates believed that if the fractious city-states accepted Philip as their leader in a common alliance, they could avoid wars among themselves and relieve the impoverished population among them by establishing Greek colonies on land to be conquered and carved out of Persian-held territory in Anatolia. That a prominent Athenian would openly appeal for a Macedonian king to save the Greeks from themselves reflected the startling new political and military reality that had emerged in the Greek world by the mid-fourth century B.C.

Unlike the city-states of Greece, Macedonia Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Macedonia, was ruled by a monarchy Hdt. 8.137, Thuc. 2.99.1, Aristot. Pol. 5.1310b 40, Dem. 18.235, Isoc. 5.105 . The power of the king of the Macedonian state was constrained by the tradition that he was supposed to listen to his people, who were accustomed to addressing their monarch with considerable freedom of speech. Above all, the king could govern effectively only as long as he maintained the support of the most powerful aristocrats, who counted as the king's social equals and controlled large bands of followers. Fighting Aristot. Pol. 7.1324b , hunting, and heavy drinking Dem. 2.18-19 were the favorite pastimes of these men. The king was expected to demonstrate his prowess in these activities to show he was a Macedonian man's man capable of heading the state. Macedonian queens and royal mothers Aeschin. 2.28, Diod. 16.91.4, Diod. 17.32.1 received respect in this male-dominated society because they came from powerful families in the Macedonian nobility or the ruling houses of lands bordering Macedonia and bore their husbands the heirs that they needed to carry on their royal dynasties. In the king's absence these royal women could vie with the king's designated representative for power at court.

Macedonians had their own language related to Greek, but the aristocrats who dominated Macedonian society routinely learned to speak Greek because they admired the idea of being Greek and thought of themselves and indeed all Macedonians as Greek by blood. At the same time, Macedonians looked down on the Greeks to the south in Greece as a soft lot unequal to the adversities of life in Macedonia. The Greeks reciprocated this scorn Hdt. 5.20.4, Hdt. 5.22.1-2, Isoc. 5.32 . The famed Athenian orator Demosthenes Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Demosthenes, Dem. 4.4, Diod. 16.54.2 (384-322 B.C.) lambasted the Macedonian king Philip II Diod. 16.1.3-6, Dem. 6.6 (*359-336) as “not only not a Greek nor related to the Greeks, but not even a barbarian from a land worth mentioning; no, he's a pestilence from Macedonia, a region where you can't even buy a slave worth his salt.” Dem. 9.31 Barbed verbal attacks like this one characterized Demosthenes's speeches on foreign and domestic policy to the Athenian assembly, where he consistently tried to convince his fellow Athenians to oppose Macedonian expansionism in Greece. His exceptional rhetorical skill also made him the foremost of his time in the writing of speeches for other men to deliver in court cases.

The Athenian orator and politician Demosthenes spoke so forcefully against Philip II Dem. 4.4, Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Demosthenes because he recognized how dangerous and ambitious Dem. 6.6 was this king, who was the person most responsible for making Macedonia into an international power and doing so against heavy odds. For one thing, strife in the royal family Diod. 14.89.2, Diod. 15.71.1, Diod. 16.2.4 and disputes among the leading aristocrats had always been so common that Macedonia before Philip's reign had never been sufficiently united to mobilize its full military strength. So real was the fear of violence from their own countrymen that Macedonian kings stationed bodyguards not only outside the door to the royal bedroom but inside the door as well. Moreover, Macedonian princes married earlier than did most men, soon after the age of twenty, because the instability of the kingship demanded the production of male heirs as soon as possible.

The situation in Macedonia was grave in 359 B.C. when the current Macedonian king, Perdiccas, and 4,000 Macedonian troops were slaughtered Diod. 16.2.4-6 in battle with the Illyrians, hostile neighbors from the north of Macedonia. In this moment of crisis, Philip persuaded the aristocrats to recognize him as king in place of his infant nephew, for whom he was now serving as regent after the loss of the previous king in the field. Philip then rallied the army by teaching the infantrymen an unstoppable new tactic Diod. 16.3.1-3 . Macedonian troops carried thrusting spears fourteen feet long, which they had to hold with two hands. Philip drilled his men to handle these heavy weapons in a phalanx formation, whose front line bristled like a lethal porcupine with outstretched spears. With the cavalry of aristocrats deployed as a strike force to soften up the enemy and protect the infantry's flanks, Philip's reorganized army promptly routed Macedonia's attackers and suppressed local rivals to the new king Isoc. 5.21, Diod. 16.3.4-7, Diod. 16.4.2-7 .

After his reorganization of the Macedonian army, Philip embarked on a whirlwind of diplomacy, bribery, and military action to make the states of Greece acknowledge his superiority Dem. 1.12-13, Diod. 16.8.1-7, Diod. 16.14.2, Diod. 16.34.4-38.7, Diod. 16.52.9-55.4, Diod. 16.59.2-16.77.3 . He financed this activity by prodigious spending of the gold and silver coinage he had minted from the mines of Macedonia and those that he captured in Thrace Diod. 16.8.6-7 . A Greek contemporary, the historian Theopompus Diod. 16.3.8 of Chios, labeled Philip “insatiable and extravagant; he did everything in a hurry ... he never spared the time to reckon up his income and expenditure.” By the late 340s B.C. Philip had cajoled or forced most of northern Greece to follow his lead in foreign policy. His goal then became to lead a united Macedonian and Greek army against the Persian Empire Diod. 16.89.1-2, Diod. 16.91.2 . His announced reason sprung from a central theme in Greek understanding of the past: the need to avenge the Persian invasion of Macedonia and Greece of 480 B.C. Philip also feared the potentially destabilizing effect on his kingdom if his reinvigorated army were left with nothing to do. To launch his grandiose invasion, however, he needed to strengthen his alliance by adding the forces of southern Greece to it.

At Athens, Demosthenes used his stirring rhetoric to castigate the Greeks for their failure to resist Philip: they stood by, he thundered, “as if Philip were a hailstorm, praying that he would not come their way, but not trying to do anything to head him off.” Dem. 9.33 Finally, Athens and Thebes headed a coalition of southern Greek states to try to block Philip's plans. In 338 B.C., Philip and his Greek allies trounced the coalition's forces at the battle of Chaeronea Diod. 16.85.2 in Boeotia. The defeated Greek states retained their internal freedom, but they were compelled to join an alliance under Philip's undisputed leadership Diod. 16.89.3 , called the League of Corinth by modern scholars after the location of its headquarters.

The course of later history proved the battle of Chaeronea Diod. 16.85.2 in 338, in which Philip of Macedon and his Greek allies defeated a coalition of other Greek states, to have been a decisive turning point in Greek history: never again would the states of Greece make foreign policy for themselves without considering, and usually following, the wishes of outside powers. This change marked the end of the Greek city-states as independent actors in international politics, but they were to retain their significance as the basic economic and social units of the Greek world. But that role would be fulfilled from now on as subjects or allies of the new kingdoms that later emerged from the Macedonian kingdom of Philip and his son Alexander after the latter's death in 323 B.C. The Hellenistic kingdoms, as these new monarchies are called, like the Roman provinces that in turn eventually replaced them as political masters of the Greeks, depended on the local leaders of the Greek city-states to collect taxes for the imperial treasuries and to insure the loyalty and order of the rest of the citizens.

A disgruntled Macedonian assassinated Philip Aristot. Pol. 5.1311b 1 in 336 B.C. Unconfirmed rumors circulated that the murder had been instigated by one of his several wives, Olympias, a princess from Epirus to the west of Macedonia. In any case, Philip's son by her, Alexander Perseus Encyclopedia entry for Alexander

With Greece pacified, Alexander in 334 B.C. led a Macedonian and Greek army into Anatolia Diod. 17.17.1 to fulfill his father's plan to avenge Greece by attacking Persia. Alexander's astounding success in conquering the entire Persian Empire while in his twenties earned him the title “the Great” in later ages. In his own time, his greatness consisted of his ability to inspire his men to follow him into hostile, unknown regions where they were reluctant to go, beyond the borders of civilization as they knew it. Alexander inspired his troops with his reckless disregard for his own safety. He often plunged into the enemy at the head of his men, sharing the danger of the common soldier. No one could miss him in his plumed helmet, vividly colored cloak, and armor polished to reflect the sun. So intent on conquering distant lands was Alexander that he had rejected advice to delay his departure from Macedonia until he had married and fathered an heir Diod. 17.16.2 , to forestall instability in case of his death. He had further alarmed his principal adviser, an experienced older man, by giving away virtually all his land and property in order to strengthen the army, thereby creating new landowners who would furnish troops. “What,” he was asked,” do you have left for yourself?” “My hopes,” Alexander replied. Those hopes centered on constructing a heroic image of himself as a warrior as glorious as the incomparable Achilles of Homer's . Alexander always kept a copy of the under his pillow, along with a dagger. Alexander's aspirations and his behavior represented the ultimate expression of the Homeric vision of the glorious conquering warrior.

Alexander cast a spear into the earth of Anatolia Diod. 17.17.2 when in 334 B.C. he crossed the Hellespont strait from Europe to Asia (in what is today part of northwestern Turkey), thereby claiming the Asian continent for himself in Homeric fashion as “territory won by the spear.” The first battle of the campaign, at the River Granicus Diod. 17.18.2 in western Anatolia, proved the worth of Alexander's Macedonian and Greek cavalry, which charged across the river and up the bank to rout the opposing Persians. Alexander visited the legendary king Midas's old capital of Gordion in Phrygia, where an oracle had promised the lordship of Asia to whoever could loose a seemingly impenetrable knot of rope tying the yoke of an ancient chariot preserved in the city. The young Macedonian, so the story goes, cut the Gordion knot with his sword. In 333 B.C. the Persian king, Darius, finally faced Alexander in battle at Issus Diod. 17.33.1 , near the southeastern corner of Anatolia. Alexander's army defeated its more numerous opponents with a characteristically bold strike of cavalry through the left side of the Persian lines followed by a flanking maneuver against the king's position in the center. Darius had to flee from the field to avoid capture, leaving behind his wives and daughters, who had accompanied his campaign in keeping with royal Persian tradition. Alexander's scrupulously chivalrous treatment of the Persian royal women Diod. 17.35.4, Diod. 17.37.3 after their capture at Issus reportedly boosted his reputation among the peoples of the king's empire.

When Tyre, a heavily fortified city on the coast of what is now Lebanon, refused to surrender to him in 332 B.C., Alexander employed the siege machines and catapults developed by his father to breach its walls Diod. 17.40.2 . The capture of Tyre rang the death knoll of the impregnable city-state. Although successful sieges remained rare after Alexander because well-constructed city walls still presented formidable barriers to attackers, Alexander's success against Tyre increased the terror of a siege for a city's general population. No longer could the citizens of a city-state confidently assume that their defensive system could withstand the technology of their enemy's offensive weapons indefinitely. The now-present fear that a siege might actually breach a city's walls made it much harder psychologically for city-states to remain united in the face of threats from enemies like aggressive kings.

Alexander next took over Egypt, where hieroglyphic inscriptions seem to show that he probably presented himself as the successor to the Persian king Diod. 17.49.1 as the land's ruler rather than as an Egyptian pharaoh. On the coast, to the west of the Nile River, Alexander founded a new city in 331 B.C. named Alexandria Diod. 17.52.1 after himself, the first of the many cities he would later go on to establish as far east as Afghanistan. During his time in Egypt, Alexander also paid a mysterious visit to the oracle of the god Ammon, whom the Greeks regarded as identical to Zeus, at the oasis of Siwah far out in the western Egyptian desert. Alexander told no one the details of his consultation of the oracle, but the news got out that he had been informed he was the son of the god

In 331 B.C., Alexander crushed the Persian king's main army at the battle of Gaugamela Diod. 17.53.1 in northern Mesopotamia near the border of modern Iraq and Iran. He subsequently proclaimed himself king of Asia in place of the Persian king. For the heterogeneous populations of the Persian Empire, the succession of a Macedonian to the Persian throne meant essentially no change in their lives. They continued to send the same taxes to a remote master, whom they rarely if ever saw. As in Egypt, Alexander left the local administrative system of the Persian empire in place, even retaining some Persian governors. His long-term aim seems to have been to forge an administrative corps composed of Macedonians, Greeks, and Persians working together to rule the territory he conquered with his army.

Alexander next led his army farther east Diod. 17.65.2 into territory hardly known to the Greeks. He pared his force to reduce the need for supplies, which were hard to acquire in the arid country through which they were marching. Each hoplite in Greek armies customarily had a personal servant to carry his armor and pack. Alexander, imitating Philip, trained his men to carry their own equipment, thereby creating a leaner force by cutting the number of army servants dramatically. As with all ancient armies, however, a large number of noncombatants trailed after the fighting force: merchants who set up little markets at every stop, women whom soldiers had taken as mates along the way and their children, entertainers, and prostitutes. Although supplying these hangers-on was not Alexander's responsibility, their foraging for themselves made it harder for Alexander's quartermasters to find what they needed to supply the army proper.

An ancient army's demand for supplies usually left a trail of destruction and famine for local inhabitants in the wake of its march. Hostile armies simply took whatever they wanted. Friendly armies expected local people to sell or donate food to its supply officers and also to the merchants trailing along. These entrepreneurs would set up markets to resell locally obtained provisions to the soldiers. Since most farmers in antiquity had practically no surplus to sell, they found this expectation— which was in reality a requirement— a terrific hardship. The money the farmers received was of little use to them because there was nothing to buy with it in the countryside, where their neighbors had also had to participate in the forced marketing of their subsistence.

From the heartland of Persia, Alexander in 329 B.C. marched northeastward into the trackless steppes of Bactria Diod. 17.75.1 (modern Afghanistan). When he proved unable to subdue completely the highly mobile locals, who avoided pitched battles in favor of the guerrilla tactics of attack and retreat, Alexander settled for an alliance that he sealed by marrying the Bactrian princess Roxane in 327 B.C. In this same period, Alexander completed the cold-blooded suppression of both real and imagined resistance to his plans Diod. 17.79.1 among the aristocrats in his officer corps. As in past years, he used accusations of treachery or disloyalty as justification for the execution of those Macedonians he had come to distrust. These executions, like the destruction of Thebes in 335 B.C., demonstrate Alexander's appreciation of terror as a disincentive to rebellion.

From Bactria Alexander headed east to India Diod. 17.84.1 . He probably intended to push on all the way through to China in search of the edge of the farthest land on the earth, which Aristotle, whom Philip had once employed as the young Alexander's tutor, had taught was a sphere. Seventy days of marching through monsoon rains, however, finally shattered the nerves of Alexander's soldiers. In the spring of 326 B.C. they mutinied Diod. 17.94.1-5 on the banks of the Hyphasis River (the modern Beas) in western India. Alexander was forced to agree to lead them in the direction of home. When his men had balked before, Alexander had always been able to shame them back into action by sulking in his tent like Achilles in the . This time the soldiers were beyond shame.

After the mutiny of his troops in northwestern India and his bitter acquiescence to their demand to return homeward, Alexander led his army south down the course of the Indus River Diod. 17.95.3 . Along the way he took out his frustration at being stopped in his eastward march by slaughtering the Indian tribes who resisted him and by risking his life more flamboyantly then ever before. As a climax to his frustrated rage, he flung himself over the wall of an Indian town to face the enemy alone like a Homeric hero Diod. 17.99.1 . His horrified officers were barely able to rescue him in time; even so, he received grievous wounds. At the mouth of the Indus on the Indian Ocean, Alexander turned a portion of his army west through the fierce desert of Gedrosia Diod. 17.105.3 . Another portion took an easier route inland, while a third group sailed westward along the coast to explore for possible sites for new settlements and harbors. Alexander himself led the contingent that braved the desert, planning to surpass earlier Persian kings by marching through territory that they had found impossible. There a flash flood wiped out most of the noncombatants following the army. Many of the soldiers also died on the march through the desert, expiring from lack of water and the heat, which has been recorded at 127 degrees in the shade in that area. Alexander, as always, shared his men's hardships. In one legendary episode from this horrible ordeal, a few men were said to have brought him a helmet containing some water they had found. Alexander spilled the water out onto the sand rather than drink when his men could not. The remains of the army finally reached safety in the heartland of Persia in 324 B.C. Diod. 17.107.1

When he had returned to Persia, Alexander promptly began to formulate plans for an invasion of the Arabian peninsula and, to follow that, all of North Africa west of Egypt. By the time of his return to Persia, Alexander had dropped all pretense of ruling over the Greeks as anything other than an absolute monarch. Despite his earlier promise to respect the internal freedom of the Greek city-states, he impinged on their autonomy by sending a peremptory decree ordering them to restore to citizenship the large number of exiles from the Greek city-states Din. 1.82, Diod. 17.109.1-2 , who had been created over the previous decades of war in Greece and whose status as wandering, stateless persons was creating unrest. Even more striking was his communication that he wished to receive the honors due a god Din. 1.94 . Initially dumbfounded by this request, the leaders of most Greek states soon complied by sending honorary delegations to him as if he were a god. The Spartan Damis pithily expressed the only prudent position on Alexander's deification open to the cowed Greeks: “If Alexander wishes to be a god, we agree that he be called a god.” Scholars continue to debate Alexander's motive for desiring the Greeks to acknowledge him as a god, but few now accept a formerly popular theory that he sought divinity because he believed the city-states would then have to obey his orders as originating from a divinity, whose authority would supersede that of all earthly regimes. Personal rather than political motives best explain his request. He almost certainly had come to believe that he was the son of Zeus; after all, Greek mythology told many stories of Zeus producing children by mating with a human female. Apollod. 2.4.1 Most of those legendary offspring were mortal, but Alexander's conquest showed that he had surpassed them. His feats must be superhuman, he could well have believed, because they exceeded the bounds of human possibility. Alexander's accomplishments demonstrated that he had achieved godlike power and therefore must be a god himself. Alexander's divinity was, in ancient terms, a natural consequence of his power.

Alexander's overall aims can best be explained as interlinked goals: the conquest and administration of the known world and the exploration and possible colonization of new territory beyond. Conquest through military action was a time-honored pursuit for Macedonian aristocrats like Alexander. He included non-Macedonians Diod. 17.108.1-3 in his administration and army because he needed their expertise, not because he wished to promote an abstract notion of what has sometimes been called “the brotherhood of man.” Alexander's explorations benefited numerous scientific fields from geography to botany because he took along scientifically minded writers to collect and catalogue the new knowledge that they encountered. The far-flung new cities Diod. 17.83.1-2 that he founded served as loyal outposts to keep the peace in conquered territory and provide warnings to headquarters in case of local uprisings. They also created new opportunities for trade in valuable goods such as spices that were not produced in the Mediterranean region.

Alexander's plans to conquer Arabia and North Africa were extinguished by his premature death Diod. 17.117.1 from a fever and heavy drinking on June 10, 323 B.C. He had already been suffering for months from depression brought on by the death of his best friend, Hephaistion. Close since their boyhoods, Alexander and Hephaistion were probably lovers. When Hephaistion died in a bout of excessive drinking, Alexander went wild with grief. The depth of his emotion was evident when he planned to build an elaborate temple to honor Hephaistion as a god. Meanwhile, Alexander threw himself into preparing for his Arabian campaign by exploring the marshy lowlands of southern Mesopotamia. Perhaps it was on one of these trips that he contracted the malaria-like fever that, exacerbated by a two-day drinking binge, killed him.

Like Pericles, Alexander had made no plans about what should happen if he should die unexpectedly. His wife Roxane was to give birth to their first child only some months after Alexander's death. When at Alexander's deathbed his commanders asked him to whom he bequeathed his kingdom, he replied, “To the most powerful.” Diod. 17.117.4

The Athenian orator Aeschines (c. 397-322 B.C.) well expressed the bewildered reaction of many people to the events of Alexander's lifetime: “What strange and unexpected event has not occurred in our time? The life we have lived is no ordinary human one, but we were born to be an object of wonder to posterity.” Aeschin. 3.132 Alexander himself certainly attained legendary status in later times. Stories of fabulous exploits attributed to him became popular folk tales throughout the ancient world, even reaching distant regions where Alexander had never trod, such as deep into Africa. The popularity of the legend of Alexander as a symbol of the height of achievement for a masculine warrior-hero served as one of his most persistent legacies to later ages. That the worlds of Greece and the Near East had been brought into closer contact than ever before represented the other long-lasting effect of his astonishing career.